Uncle Leo XII attended to the details of the operation as if it were being performed on his own flesh. His singular interest in false teeth had developed on one of his first trips along the Magdalena River and was the result of his maniacal love for bel canto. One night when the moon was full, at the entrance to the port of Gamarra, he made a wager with a German surveyor that he could awaken the creatures of the jungle by singing a Neapolitan romanza from the Captain’s balustrade. He almost lost the bet. In the river darkness one could hear the flapping wings of the cranes in the marshes, the thudding tails of the alligators, the terror of the shad as they tried to leap onto dry land, but on the final note, when it was feared that the singer would burst his arteries with the power of his song, his false teeth dropped out of his mouth with his last breath and fell into the water.
The boat had to wait three days at the port of Tenerife while an emergency set was made for him. It was a perfect fit. But on the voyage home, trying to explain to the Captain how he had lost the first pair, Uncle Leo XII filled his lungs with the burning air of the jungle, sang the highest note he could, held it to his last breath as he tried to frighten the alligators that were sunning themselves and watching the passage of the boat with unblinking eyes, and the new set of false teeth sank into the current as well. From then on, he kept spare sets of teeth everywhere, in various places throughout his house, in his desk drawer, and on each of the three company boats. Moreover, when he ate out he would carry an extra pair in a cough drop box that he kept in his pocket, because he had once broken a pair trying to eat pork cracklings at a picnic. Fearing that his nephew might be the victim of similar unpleasant surprises, Uncle Leo XII told Dr. Adonay to make him two sets right from the start: one of cheap materials for daily use at the office, and the other for Sundays and holidays, with a gold chip in the first molar that would impart a touch of realism. At last, on a Palm Sunday ringing with the sound of holiday bells, Florentino Ariza returned to the street with a new identity, his perfect smile giving him the impression that someone else had taken his place in the world.
This was at the time that his mother died and Florentino Ariza was left alone in his house. It was a haven that suited his way of loving, because the location was discreet despite the fact that the numerous windows that gave the street its name made one think of too many eyes behind the curtains. But the house had been built to make Fermina Daza, and no one but Fermina Daza, happy, so that Florentino Ariza preferred to lose a good many opportunities during his most fruitful years rather than soil his house with other loves. To his good fortune, every step he climbed in the R.C.C. brought new privileges, above all secret privileges, and one of the most practical was the possibility of using the offices at night, or on Sundays or holidays, with the complicity of the watchmen. Once, when he was First Vice President, he was making emergency love to one of the Sunday girls, sitting on a desk chair with her astride him, when the door opened without warning. Uncle Leo XII peered in, as if he had walked into the wrong office, and stared at his terrified nephew over his eyeglasses. “I’ll be damned!” said his uncle, without the least sign of shock. “You screw just like your dad!” And before he closed the door, he said, with his eyes looking off into the distance:
“And you, Señorita, feel free to carry on. I swear by my honor that I have not seen your face.”
The matter was not mentioned again, but the following week it was impossible to work in Florentino Ariza’s office. On Monday the electricians burst in to install a rotating fan on the ceiling. The locksmiths arrived unannounced and with as much noise as if they were going to war, installed a lock on the door so that it could be bolted from the inside. The carpenters took measurements without saying why, the upholsterers brought swatches of cretonne to see if they matched the color of the walls, and the next week an enormous double couch covered in a Dionysian flowered print was delivered through the window because it was too big for the doors. They worked at the oddest hours, with an impertinence that did not seem unintentional, and they offered the same response to all his protests: “Orders from the head office.” Florentino Ariza never knew if this sort of interference was a kindness on his uncle’s part or a very personal way of forcing him to face up to his abusive behavior. The truth never occurred to him, which was that Uncle Leo XII was encouraging his nephew, because he, too, had heard the rumors that his habits were different from those of most men, and this obstacle to naming him as his successor had caused him great distress.
Unlike his brother, Leo XII Loayza had enjoyed a stable marriage of sixty years’ duration, and he was always proud of not working on Sundays. He had four sons and a daughter, and he wanted to prepare all of them as heirs to his empire, but by a series of coincidences that were common in the novels of the day, but that no one believed in real life, his four sons died, one after the other, as they rose to positions of authority, and his daughter had no river vocation whatsoever and preferred to die watching the boats on the Hudson from a window fifty meters high. There were even those who accepted as true the tale that Florentino Ariza, with his sinister appearance and his vampire’s umbrella, had somehow been the cause of all those coincidences.
When doctor’s orders forced his uncle into retirement, Florentino Ariza began, with good grace, to sacrifice some of his Sunday loves. He accompanied his uncle to his country retreat in one of the city’s first automobiles, whose crank handle had such a powerful recoil that it had dislocated the shoulder of the first driver. They talked for many hours, the old man in the hammock with his name embroidered in silk thread, removed from everything and with his back to the sea, in the old slave plantation from whose terraces, filled with crepe myrtle, one could see the snow-covered peaks of the sierra in the afternoon. It had always been difficult for Florentino Ariza and his uncle to talk about anything other than river navigation, and it still was on those slow afternoons when death was always an unseen guest. One of Uncle Leo XII’s constant preoccupations was that river navigation not pass into the hands of entrepreneurs from the interior with connections to European corporations. “This has always been a business run by people from the coast,” he would say. “If the inlanders get hold of it, they will give it back to the Germans.” His preoccupation was consistent with a political conviction that he liked to repeat even when it was not to the point.
“I am almost one hundred years old, and I have seen everything change, even the position of the stars in the universe, but I have not seen anything change yet in this country,” he would say. “Here they make new constitutions, new laws, new wars every three months, but we are still in colonial times.”
To his brother Masons, who attributed all evils to the failure of federalism, he would always reply: “The War of a Thousand Days was lost twenty-three years ago in the war of ’76.” Florentino Ariza, whose indifference to politics hovered on the limits of the absolute, listened to these increasingly frequent and tiresome speeches as one listens to the sound of the sea. But he was a rigorous debater when it came to company policy. In opposition to his uncle’s opinion, he thought that the setbacks in river navigation, always on the edge of disaster, could be remedied only by a voluntary renunciation of the riverboat monopoly that the National Congress had granted to the River Company of the Caribbean for ninety-nine years and a day. His uncle protested: “My namesake Leona with her worthless anarchist theories has put those ideas in your head.” But that was only half true. Florentino Ariza based his thinking on the experience of the German commodore Johann B. Elbers, whose noble intelligence had been destroyed by excessive personal ambition. His uncle, however, believed that the failure of Elbers was due not to privileges but to the unrealistic commitments he had contracted for, which had almost been tantamount to his assuming responsibility for the geography of the nation: he had taken charge of maintaining the navigability of the river, the port installations, the access routes on land, the means of transportation. Besides, he would say, the virulent opposition of President Simón Bolívar was no laughing m
atter.
Most of his business associates viewed those disputes as if they were matrimonial arguments, in which both parties are right. The old man’s obstinacy seemed natural to them, not because, as it was too easy to say, old age had made him less visionary than he had always been, but because renouncing the monopoly must have seemed to him like throwing away the victories of a historic battle that he and his brothers had waged unaided, back in heroic times, against powerful adversaries from all over the world. Which is why no one opposed him when he kept so tight a hold on his rights that no one could touch them before their legal expiration. But suddenly, when Florentino Ariza had already surrendered his weapons during those meditative afternoons on the plantation, Uncle Leo XII agreed to renounce the centenarian privilege, on the one honorable condition that it not take place before his death.
It was his final act. He did not speak of business again, he did not even allow anyone to consult with him, he did not lose a single ringlet from his splendid imperial head or an iota of his lucidity, but he did everything possible to keep anyone from seeing him who might pity him. He passed the days in contemplation of the perpetual snows from his terrace, rocking slowly in a Viennese rocker next to a table where the servants always kept a pot of black coffee hot for him, along with a glass of water with boric acid that contained two plates of false teeth, which he no longer used except to receive visitors. He saw very few friends, and he would speak only of a past so remote that it antedated river navigation. But he still had one new topic of conversation left: his desire that Florentino Ariza marry. He expressed his wish to him several times, and always in the same way:
“If I were fifty years younger,” he would say, “I would marry my namesake Leona. I cannot imagine a better wife.”
Florentino Ariza trembled at the idea of his labor of so many years being frustrated at the last moment by this unforeseen circumstance. He would have preferred to renounce everything, throw it all away, die, rather than fail Fermina Daza. Fortunately, Uncle Leo XII did not insist. When he turned ninety-two, he recognized his nephew as sole heir and retired from the company.
Six months later, by unanimous agreement, Florentino Ariza was named President of the Board of Directors and General Manager of the company. After the champagne toast on the day he took over the post, the old lion in retirement excused himself for speaking without getting up from the rocker, and he improvised a brief speech that seemed more like an elegy. He said that his life had begun and ended with two providential events. The first was that The Liberator had carried him in his arms in the village of Turbaco when he was making his ill-fated journey toward death. The other had been finding, despite all the obstacles that destiny had interposed, a successor worthy of the company. At last, trying to undramatize the drama, he concluded:
“The only frustration I carry away from this life is that of singing at so many funerals except my own.”
It goes without saying that to close the ceremony he sang the “addio alla vita” from Tosca. He sang it a capella, which was the style he preferred, in a voice that was still steady. Florentino Ariza was moved, but he showed it only in the slight tremor in his voice as he expressed his thanks. In just the same way that he had done and thought everything he had done and thought in life, he had scaled the heights only because of his fierce determination to be alive and in good health at the moment he would fulfill his destiny in the shadow of Fermina Daza.
However, it was not her memory alone that accompanied him to the party Leona Cassiani gave for him that night. The memory of them all was with him: those who slept in the cemeteries, thinking of him through the roses he planted over them, as well as those who still laid their heads on the pillow where their husbands slept, their horns golden in the moonlight. Deprived of one, he wanted to be with them all at the same time, which is what he always wanted whenever he was fearful. For even during his most difficult times and at his worst moments, he had maintained some link, no matter how weak, with his countless lovers of so many years: he always kept track of their lives.
And so that night he remembered Rosalba, the very first one, who had carried off the prize of his virginity and whose memory was still as painful as it had been the first day. He had only to close his eyes to see her in her muslin dress and her hat with the long silk ribbons, rocking her child’s cage on the deck of the boat. Several times in the course of the numerous years of his life he had been ready to set out in search of her, without knowing where, or her last name, or if she was the one he was looking for, but certain of finding her somewhere among groves of orchids. Each time, because of a real difficulty at the last minute or because of an ill-timed failure of his own will, his trip was postponed just as they were about to raise the gangplank: always for a reason that had something to do with Fermina Daza.
He remembered the Widow Nazaret, the only one with whom he had profaned his mother’s house on the Street of Windows, although it had been Tránsito Ariza and not he who had asked her in. He was more understanding of her than of any of the others, because she was the only one who radiated enough tenderness to compensate for Fermina Daza despite her sluggishness in bed. But she had the inclinations of an alleycat, which were more indomitable than the strength of her tenderness, and this meant that both of them were condemned to infidelity. Still, they continued to be intermittent lovers for almost thirty years, thanks to their musketeers’ motto: Unfaithful but not disloyal. She was also the only one for whom Florentino Ariza assumed any responsibility: when he heard that she had died and was going to a pauper’s grave, he buried her at his own expense and was the only mourner at the funeral.
He remembered other widows he had loved. He remembered Prudencia Pitre, the oldest of those still alive, who was known to everyone as the Widow of Two because she had outlived both her husbands. And the other Prudencia, the Widow Arellano, the amorous one, who would rip the buttons from his clothes so that he would have to stay in her house while she sewed them back on. And Josefa, the Widow Zúñiga, mad with love for him, who was ready to cut off his penis with gardening shears while he slept, so that he would belong to no one else even if he could not belong to her.
He remembered Angeles Alfaro, the most ephemeral and best loved of them all, who came for six months to teach string instruments at the Music School and who spent moonlit nights with him on the flat roof of her house, as naked as the day she was born, playing the most beautiful suites in all music on a cello whose voice became human between her golden thighs. From the first moonlit night, both of them broke their hearts in the fierce love of inexperience. But Angeles Alfaro left as she had come, with her tender sex and her sinner’s cello, on an ocean liner that flew the flag of oblivion, and all that remained of her on the moonlit roofs was a fluttered farewell with a white handkerchief like a solitary sad dove on the horizon, as if she were a verse from the Poetic Festival. With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.” He wept copious tears at the grief of parting. But as soon as the ship had disappeared over the horizon, the memory of Fermina Daza once again occupied all his space.
He remembered Andrea Varón, outside whose house he had spent the previous week, but the orange light in the bathroom had been a warning that he could not go in: someone had arrived before him. Someone: man or woman, because Andrea Varón did not hesitate over such details when it came to the follies of love. Of all those on the list, she was the only one who earned a living with her body, but she did so at her pleasure and without a business manager. In her day she had enjoyed a legendary career as a clandestine courtesan who deserved her nom de guerre, Our Lady of Everybody. She drove governors and admirals mad, she watched eminent heroes of arms and letters who were not as illustrious as they believed, and even some who w
ere, as they wept on her shoulder. It was true, however, that President Rafael Reyes, after only a hurried half hour between appointments in the city, granted her a lifetime pension for distinguished service to the Ministry of Finance, where she had never worked a day of her life. She distributed her gifts of pleasure as far as her body could reach, and although her indecent conduct was public knowledge, no one could have made a definitive case against her, because her eminent accomplices gave her the same protection they gave themselves, knowing that they had more to lose in a scandal than she did. For her sake Florentino Ariza had violated his sacred principle of never paying, and she had violated hers of never doing it free of charge, even with her husband. They had agreed upon a symbolic fee of one peso, which she did not take and he did not hand to her, but which they put in the piggy bank until enough of them had accumulated to buy something charming from overseas in the Arcade of the Scribes. It was she who attributed a distinctive sensuality to the enemas he used for his crises of constipation, who convinced him to share them with her, and they took them together in the course of their mad afternoons as they tried to create even more love within their love.
Love in the Time of Cholera Page 33