Love in the Time of Cholera

  Six months after their first meeting, they found themselves at last in a cabin on a riverboat that was being painted at the docks. It was a marvelous afternoon. Olimpia Zuleta had the joyous love of a startled pigeon fancier, and she preferred to remain naked for several hours in a slow-moving repose that was, for her, as loving as love itself. The cabin was dismantled, half painted, and they would take the odor of turpentine away with them in the memory of a happy afternoon. In a sudden inspiration, Florentino Ariza opened a can of red paint that was within reach of the bunk, wet his index finger, and painted the pubis of the beautiful pigeon fancier with an arrow of blood pointing south, and on her belly the words: This pussy is mine. That same night, Olimpia Zuleta undressed in front of her husband, having forgotten what was scrawled there, and he did not say a word, his breathing did not even change, nothing, but he went to the bathroom for his razor while she was putting on her nightgown, and in a single slash he cut her throat.

  Florentino did not find out until many days later, when the fugitive husband was captured and told the newspapers the reasons for the crime and how he had committed it. For many years he thought with terror about the signed letters, he kept track of the prison term of the murderer, who knew him because of his dealings with the boat company, but it was not so much fear of a knife at his throat or a public scandal as the misfortune of Fermina Daza's learning about his infidelity. One day during his years of waiting, the woman who took care of Transito Ariza had to stay at the market longer than expected because of an unseasonable downpour, and when she returned to the house she found her sitting in the rocking chair, painted and bedecked as always, and with eyes so animated and a smile so mischievous that her caretaker did not realize she was dead until two hours later. Shortly before her death she had distributed to the neighborhood children the fortune in gold and jewels hidden in the jars buried under her bed, saying they could eat them like candy, and some of the most valuable were impossible to recover. Florentino Ariza buried her in the former Hand of God ranch, which was still known as the Cholera Cemetery, and he planted a rosebush on her grave.

  After his first few visits to the cemetery, Florentino Ariza discovered that Olimpia Zuleta was buried very close by, without a tombstone but with her name and the date scrawled in the fresh cement of the crypt, and he thought in horror that this was one of her husband's sanguinary jokes. When the roses bloomed he would place a flower on her grave if there was no one in sight, and later he planted a cutting taken from his mother's rosebush. Both bloomed in such profusion that Florentino Ariza had to bring shears and other garden tools to keep them under control. But the task was beyond him: after a few years the two rosebushes had spread like weeds among the graves, and from then on, the unadorned cemetery of the plague was called the Cemetery of Roses, until some mayor who was less realistic than popular wisdom cleared out the roses one night and hung a republican sign from the arch of the entrance gate: Universal Cemetery.

  The death of his mother left Florentino Ariza condemned once again to his maniacal pursuits: the office, his meetings in strict rotation with his regular mistresses, the domino games at the Commercial Club, the same books of love, the Sunday visits to the cemetery. It was the rust of routine, which he had despised and feared so much, but which had protected him from an awareness of his age. However, one Sunday in December, when the rosebushes on the tombs had already defeated the garden shears, he saw the swallows on the recently installed electric wires and he suddenly realized how much time had gone by since the death of his mother, and how much since the murder of Olimpia Zuleta, and how very much since that other distant December afternoon when Fermina Daza sent him a letter saying yes, she would love him always. Until then he had behaved as if time would not pass for him but only for others. Just the week before, he happened to meet on the street one of the many couples who had married because of the letters he had written, and he did not recognize their oldest child, who was his godson. He smoothed over his embarrassment with the conventional exclamation: "I'll be damned, he's a man already!" And he continued in the same way even after his body began sending him the first warning signals, because he had always had the iron constitution of the sickly. Transito Ariza used to say: "The only disease my son ever had was cholera." She had confused cholera with love, of course, long before her memory failed. But in any event she was mistaken, because her son had suffered from six blennorrhagias, although the doctor had said they were not six but the same one that reappeared after each lost battle. He had also had a swollen lymph gland, four warts, and six cases of impetigo in the groin, but it would not have occurred to him or any man to think of these as diseases; they were only the spoils of war.

  When he had just turned forty, he had gone to the doctor because of vague pains in various parts of his body. After many tests, the doctor had said: "It's age." He had returned home without even wondering if any of that had anything to do with him. For his only point of reference in his own past was the ephemeral love affair with Fermina Daza, and only what concerned her had anything to do with reckoning his life. So that on the afternoon when he saw the swallows on the electric wires, he reviewed the past from his earliest memory, he reviewed his chance loves, the countless pitfalls he had been obliged to avoid in order to reach a position of authority, the events without number that had given rise to his bitter determination that Fermina Daza would be his and he would be hers despite everything, in the face of everything, and only then did he realize that his life was passing. He was shaken by a visceral shudder that left his mind blank, and he had to drop the garden tools and lean against the cemetery wall so that the first blow of old age would not knock him down.

  "Damn it," he said, appalled, "that all happened thirty years ago!"

  And it had. Thirty years that had also gone by for Fermina Daza, of course, but had been for her the most pleasant and exhilarating years of her life. The days of horror in the Palace of Casalduero were relegated to the trash heap of memory. She was living in her new house in La Manga, absolute mistress of her own destiny, with a husband she would have preferred to all the men in the world if she had to choose again, a son who was continuing the family tradition in the Medical School, and a daughter so much like her when she was her age that at times she was disturbed by the impression of feeling herself duplicated. She had returned to Europe three times after the unfortunate trip from which she had intended never to return so that she would not have to live in perpetual turmoil.

  God must have finally listened to someone's prayers: after two years in Paris, when Fermina Daza and Juvenal Urbino were just beginning to find what remained of their love in the ruins, a midnight telegram awoke them with the news that Dona Blanca de Urbino was gravely ill, and almost on its heels came another with the news of her death. They returned without delay. Fermina Daza walked off the ship wearing a black tunic whose fullness could not hide her condition. In fact she was pregnant again, and this news gave rise to a popular song, more mischievous than malicious, whose chorus was heard for the rest of the year: What d'you think she does over there, this beauty from our earth? Whenever she comes back from Paris, she's ready to give birth. Despite the vulgarity of the words, for many years afterward Dr. Juvenal Urbino would request it at Social Club dances to prove he was a good sport.

  The noble palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, whose existence and coat of arms had never been documented, was sold to the municipal treasury for a decent price, and then resold for a fortune to the central government when a Dutch researcher began excavations to prove that the real grave of Christopher Columbus was located there: the fifth one so far. The sisters of Dr. Urbino, without taking vows, went to live in seclusion in the Convent of the Salesians, and Fermina Daza stayed in her father's old house until the villa in La Manga was completed. She walked in with a firm step, she walked in prepared to command, with the English furniture brought back on their honeymoon and the complementary furnishings they sent for after their reconciliation trip, and from the first day she
began to fill it with exotic animals that she herself went to buy on the schooners from the Antilles. She walked in with the husband she had won back, the son she had raised with propriety, the daughter who was born four months after their return and whom they baptized Ofelia. Dr. Urbino, for his part, understood that it was impossible to possess his wife as completely as he had on their honeymoon, because the part of love he wanted was what she had given, along with her best hours, to her children, but he learned to live and be happy with what was left over. The harmony they had longed for reached its culmination when they least expected it, at a gala dinner at which a delicious food was served that Fermina Daza could not identify. She began with a good portion, but she liked it so much that she took another of the same size, and she was lamenting the fact that urbane etiquette did not permit her to help herself to a third, when she learned that she had just eaten, with unsuspected pleasure, two heaping plates of pureed eggplant. She accepted defeat with good grace, and from that time on, eggplant in all its forms was served at the villa in La Manga with almost as much frequency as at the Palace of Casalduero, and it was enjoyed so much by everyone that Dr. Juvenal Urbino would lighten the idle hours of his old age by insisting that he wanted to have another daughter so that he could give her the best-loved word in the house as a name: Eggplant Urbino.

  Fermina Daza knew then that private life, unlike public life, was fickle and unpredictable. It was not easy for her to establish real differences between children and adults, but in the last analysis she preferred children, because their judgment was more reliable. She had barely turned the corner into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusionment of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young, in the Park of the Evangels. Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. In society she came to be the woman most loved, most catered to, and by the same token most feared, but in nothing was she more demanding or less forgiving than in the management of her house. She always felt as if her life had been lent to her by her husband: she was absolute monarch of a vast empire of happiness, which had been built by him and for him alone. She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anyone else in the world, but only for his own sake: she was in his holy service.

  If anything vexed her, it was the perpetual chain of daily meals. For they not only had to be served on time: they had to be perfect, and they had to be just what he wanted to eat, without his having to be asked. If she ever did ask, in one of the innumerable useless ceremonies of their domestic ritual, he would not even look up from the newspaper and would reply: "Anything." In his amiable way he was telling the truth, because one could not imagine a less despotic husband. But when it was time to eat, it could not be anything, but just what he wanted, and with no defects: the meat should not taste of meat, and the fish should not taste of fish, and the pork should not taste of mange, and the chicken should not taste of feathers. Even when it was not the season for asparagus, it had to be found regardless of cost, so that he could take pleasure in the vapors of his own fragrant urine. She did not blame him: she blamed life. But he was an implacable protagonist in that life. At the mere hint of a doubt, he would push aside his plate and say: "This meal has been prepared without love." In that sphere he would achieve moments of fantastic inspiration. Once he tasted some chamomile tea and sent it back, saying only: "This stuff tastes of window." Both she and the servants were surprised because they had never heard of anyone who had drunk boiled window, but when they tried the tea in an effort to understand, they understood: it did taste of window.

  He was a perfect husband: he never picked up anything from the floor, or turned out a light, or closed a door. In the morning darkness, when he found a button missing from his clothes, she would hear him say: "A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons." Every day, at his first swallow of coffee and at his first spoonful of soup, he would break into a heartrending howl that no longer frightened anyone, and then unburden himself: "The day I leave this house, you will know it is because I grew tired of always having a burned mouth." He would say that they never prepared lunches as appetizing and unusual as on the days when he could not eat because he had taken a laxative, and he was so convinced that this was treachery on the part of his wife that in the end he refused to take a purgative unless she took one with him.

  Tired of his lack of understanding, she asked him for an unusual birthday gift: that for one day he would take care of the domestic chores. He accepted in amusement, and indeed took charge of the house at dawn. He served a splendid breakfast, but he forgot that fried eggs did not agree with her and that she did not drink cafe con leche. Then he ordered a birthday luncheon for eight guests and gave instructions for tidying the house, and he tried so hard to manage better than she did that before noon he had to capitulate without a trace of embarrassment. From the first moment he realized he did not have the slightest idea where anything was, above all in the kitchen, and the servants let him upset everything to find each item, for they were playing the game too. At ten o'clock no decisions had been made regarding lunch because the housecleaning was not finished yet, the bedroom was not straightened, the bathroom was not scrubbed; he forgot to replace the toilet paper, change the sheets, and send the coachmen for the children, and he confused the servants' duties: he told the cook to make the beds and set the chambermaids to cooking. At eleven o'clock, when the guests were about to arrive, the chaos in the house was such that Fermina Daza resumed command, laughing out loud, not with the triumphant attitude she would have liked but shaken instead with compassion for the domestic helplessness of her husband. He was bitter as he offered the argument he always used: "Things did not go as badly for me as they would for you if you tried to cure the sick." But it was a useful lesson, and not for him alone. Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

  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 P
etra 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 Cesar 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.