Her relationship with her father had lacked affection since the expulsion of Aunt Escolástica, although they had found the way to live together without bothering each other. When she awoke, he had already gone to his business. He rarely missed the ritual of lunch, although he almost never ate, for the aperitifs and Galician appetizers at the Parish Café satisfied him. He did not eat supper either: they left his meal on the table, everything on one plate covered by another, although they knew that he would not eat it until the next day when it was reheated for his breakfast. Once a week he gave his daughter money for expenses, which he calculated with care and she administered with rigor, but he listened with pleasure to any request she might make for unforeseen expenses. He never questioned a penny she spent, he never asked her for any explanations, but she behaved as if she had to make an accounting before the Tribunal of the Holy Office.

The house was only three blocks away. The cousins did not real-ize that Dr. Urbino had given instructions to the coachman, but he must have done so, because it took the carriage almost half an hour to reach its destination. The girls were on the principal seat and he sat opposite them, facing, the back of the carriage. Fermina turned her head toward the window and was lost in the void. Hildebranda, on the other hand, was delighted, and Dr. Urbino was even more delighted by her delight. As soon as the carriage began to move, she sensed the warm odor of the leather seats, the intimacy of the padded interior, and she said that it seemed a nice place to spend the rest of one』s life. Very soon they began to laugh, to exchange jokes as if they were old friends, and they began to match wits in a simple word game that con-sisted of placing a nonsense syllable after every other syllable. They pretended that Fermina did not understand them, although they knew she not only understood but was listening as well, which is why they did it. After much laughter, Hildebranda confessed that she could no longer endure the torture of her boots.

Impure water was not all that alarmed Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He was just as concerned with the lack of hygiene at the public market, a vast extension of cleared land along Las ánimas Bay where the sailing ships from the Antilles would dock. An illustrious traveler of the period described the market as one of the most varied in the world. It was rich, in fact, and profuse and noisy, but also, perhaps, the most alarming of markets. Set on its own garbage heap, at the mercy of capricious tides, it was the spot where the bay belched filth from the sewers back onto land. The offal from the adjoining slaughterhouse was also thrown away there--severed heads, rotting viscera, animal refuse that floated, in sunshine and starshine, in a swamp of blood. The buzzards fought for it with the rats and the dogs in a perpetual scramble among the deer and succulent capons from Sotavento hanging from the eaves of the market stalls, and the spring vegetables from Arjona displayed on straw mats spread over the ground. Dr. Urbino wanted to make the place sanitary, he wanted a slaughterhouse built somewhere else and a covered market constructed with stained-glass turrets, like the one he had seen in the old boquerías in Barcelona, where the provisions looked so splendid and clean that it seemed a shame to eat them. But even the most complaisant of his notable friends pitied his illusory passion. That is how they were: they spent their lives proclaiming their proud origins, the historic merits of the city, the value of its relics, its heroism, its beauty, but they were blind to the decay of the years. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, on the other hand, loved it enough to see it with the eyes of truth.

This conviction became even more bitter after the fear caused by the black doll that was sent to her without any letter, but whose origin seemed easy to imagine: only Dr. Juvenal Urbino could have sent it. It had been bought in Martinique, according to the original tag, and it was dressed in an exquisite gown, its hair rippled with gold threads, and it closed its eyes when it was laid down. It seemed so charming to Fermina Daza that she overcame her scruples and laid it on her pillow during the day and grew accustomed to sleeping with it at night. After a time, however, she discovered when she awoke from an exhausting dream that the doll was growing: the original exquisite dress she had arrived in was up above her thighs, and her shoes had burst from the pressure of her feet. Fermina Daza had heard of African spells, but none as frightening as this. On the other hand, she could not imagine that a man like Juvenal Urbino would be capable of such an atrocity. She was right: the doll had been brought not by his coachman but by an itinerant shrimpmonger whom no one knew. Trying to solve the enigma, Fermina Daza thought for a moment of Florentino Ariza, whose depressed condition caused her dismay, but life convinced her of her error. The mystery was never clarified, and just thinking about it made her shudder with fear long after she was married and had children and thought of herself as destiny』s darling: the happiest woman in the world.

Dr. Urbino』s last resort was the mediation of Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, who could not deny the request of a family that had sup-ported her Community since its establishment in the Americas. She appeared one morning at nine o』clock in the company of a novice, and for half an hour the two of them had to amuse themselves with the birdcages while Fermina Daza finished her bath. She was a masculine German with a metallic accent and an imperious gaze that had no relationship to her puerile passions. Fermina Daza hated her and everything that had to do with her more than anything in this world, and the mere memory of her false piety made scorpions crawl in her belly. Just the sight of her from the bathroom door was enough to revive the torture of school, the unbearable boredom of daily Mass, the terror of examinations, the servile diligence of the novices, all of that life distorted by the prism of spiritual poverty.

After three days of favorable water, however, it became more difficult to navigate between inopportune sandbanks and deceptive rapids. The river turned muddy and grew narrower and narrower in a tangled jungle of colossal trees where there was only an occasional straw hut next to the piles of wood for the ship』s boilers. The screech-ing of the parrots and the chattering of the invisible monkeys seemed to intensify the midday heat. At night it was necessary to anchor the boat in order to sleep, and then the simple fact of being alive became unendurable. To the heat and the mosquitoes was added the reek of strips of salted meat hung to dry on the railings. Most of the pas-sengers, above all the Europeans, abandoned the pestilential stench of their cabins and spent the night walking the decks, brushing away all sorts of predatory creatures with the same towel they used to dry their incessant perspiration, and at dawn they were exhausted and swollen with bites.

After a while he took her hand again, and this time it was warm and relaxed but still moist with a tender dew. They were silent and unmoving for a while longer, he looking for the opportunity to take the next step and she waiting for it without knowing where it would come from, while the darkness expanded as their breathing grew more and more intense. Without warning he let go of her hand and made his leap into the void: he wet the tip of his forefinger with his tongue and grazed her nipple when it was caught off guard, and she felt a mortal explosion as if he had touched a raw nerve. She was glad of the darkness so he could not see the searing blush that shook her all the way to the base of her skull. 「Don』t worry,」 he said with great calm. 「Don』t forget that I』ve met them already.」 He felt her smile, and her voice was sweet and new in the darkness.

When Dr. Juvenal Urbino removed the blindfold he found her changed, and he understood that the game had ended, and had not ended well. At a sign from him, the coachman turned the carriage around and drove into the Park of the Evangels, just as the lamplighter was making his rounds. All the churches were ringing the Angelus. Hildebranda hurried out of the carriage, somewhat disturbed at the idea that she had offended her cousin, and she said goodbye to the Doctor with a perfunctory handshake. Fermina did the same, but when she tried to withdraw her hand in its satin glove, Dr. Urbino squeezed her ring finger.

One rainy afternoon the two of them were in the office his father kept in the house; he was drawing larks and sunflowers with colored chalk on the tiled floor, and his father was reading by the light shining through the window, his vest unbuttoned and elastic armbands on his shirt sleeves. Suddenly he stopped reading to scratch his back with a long-handled back scratcher that had a little silver hand on the end. Since he could not reach the spot that itched, he asked his son to scratch him with his nails, and as the boy did so he had the strange sensation of not feeling his own body. At last his father looked at him over his shoulder with a sad smile.

Sister Franca de la Luz pretended not to notice the remark, but her eyelids flamed. She continued to dangle the rosary in front of Fermina Daza』s eyes.

On the eighth day, the boat navigated with great difficulty through a turbulent strait squeezed between marble cliffs, and after lunch it anchored in Puerto Nare. This was the disembarkation point for those passengers who would continue their journey into Antioquia, one of the provinces most affected by the new civil war. The port consisted of half a dozen palm huts and a store made of wood, with a zinc roof, and it was protected by several squads of barefoot and ill-armed soldiers because there-had been rumors of a plan by the insurrection-ists to plunder the boats. Behind the houses, reaching to the sky, rose a promontory of uncultivated highland with a wrought-iron cornice at the edge of the precipice. No one on board slept well that night, but the attack did not materialize, and in the morning the port was transformed into a Sunday fair, with Indians selling Tagua amulets and love potions amid packs of animals ready to begin the six-day ascent to the orchid jungles of the central mountain range.

「It is yours,」 she said.

Three more letters arrived with the last rains in October, the first of them accompanied by a little box of violet pastilles from Flavigny Abbey. Two had been delivered at the door by Dr. Juvenal Urbino』s coachman, and the Doctor had greeted Gala Placidia from the carriage window, first so that there would be no doubt that the letters were his, and second so that no one could tell him they had not been received. Moreover, both of them were sealed with his monogram in wax and written in the cryptic scrawl that Fermina Daza already recognized as a physician』s handwriting. Both of them said in substance what had been said in the first, and were conceived in the same submissive spirit, but underneath their propriety one could begin to detect an impatience that was never evident in the parsimonious letters of Florentino Ariza. Fermina Daza read them as soon as they were delivered, two weeks apart, and without knowing why, she changed her mind as she was about to throw them into the fire. But she never thought of answering them.

When Fermina and Hildebranda came out of the Belgian』s studio, there were so many people in the plaza across from the Arcade of the Scribes that even the balconies were crowded. They had forgotten that their faces were white with starch and that their lips were painted with a chocolate-colored salve and that their clothes were not appro-priate to the time of day or the age. The street greeted them with cat-calls and mockery. They were cornered, trying to escape public derision, when the landau drawn by the golden chestnuts opened a path through the crowd. The catcalls ceased and the hostile groups dispersed. Hildebranda was never to forget her first sight of the man who appeared on the footboard: his satin top hat, his brocaded vest, his knowing gestures, the sweetness in his eyes, the authority of his presence.

「It』s not so much.」

Then, with authoritative methodology, he explained it to her in all seriousness while he moved her hand to the places he mentioned and she allowed it to be moved with the obedience of an exemplary pupil. At a propitious moment he suggested that all of this was easier in the light. He was going to turn it on, but she held his arm, saying: 「I see better with my hands.」 In reality she wanted to turn on the light as well, but she wanted to be the one to do it, without anyone』s order-ing her to, and she had her way. Then he saw her in the sudden brightness, huddled in the fetal position beneath the sheet.

The ship made its way across the bay through a floating blanket of drowned animals, and most of the passengers took refuge in their cabins to escape the stench. The young doctor walked down the gangplank dressed in perfect alpaca, wearing a vest and dustcoat, with the beard of a young Pasteur and his hair divided by a neat, pale part, and with enough self-control to hide the lump in his throat caused not by terror but by sadness. On the nearly deserted dock guarded by barefoot soldiers without uniforms, his sisters and mother were waiting for him, along with his closest friends, whom he found insipid and without expectations despite their sophisticated airs; they spoke about the crisis of the civil war as if it were remote and foreign, but they all had an evasive tremor in their voices and an uncertainty in their eyes that belied their words. His mother moved him most of all. She was still young, a woman who had made a mark on life with her elegance and social drive, but who was now slowly withering in the aroma of camphor that rose from her widow』s crepe. She must have seen herself in her son』s confusion, and she asked in immediate self-defense why his skin was as pale as wax.

It was only then that she learned that her father had applied for membership in the Social Club on several occasions, and that each time he had been rejected with such a large number of black balls that another attempt was not possible. But Lorenzo Daza had an infinite capacity for assimilating humilia-tions, and he continued his ingenious strategies for arranging casual encounters with Juvenal Urbino, not realizing that it was Juvenal Urbino who went out of his way to let himself be encountered. At times they spent hours chatting in the office, while the house seemed suspended at the edge of time because Fermina Daza would not permit anything to run its normal course until he left. The Parish Café was a good intermediate haven. It was there that Lorenzo Daza gave Juvenal Urbino his first lessons in chess, and he was such a diligent pupil that chess became an incurable addiction that tor-mented him until the day of his death.

But he watched as she grasped the animal under study without hesitation, turned it this way and that, observed it with an interest that was beginning to seem more than scientific, and said when she was finished: 「How ugly it is, even uglier than a woman』s thing.」 He agreed, and pointed out other disadvantages more serious than ugliness. He said: 「It is like a firstborn son: you spend your life working for him, sacri-ficing everything for him, and at the moment of truth he does just as he pleases.」 She continued to examine it, asking what this was for and what that was for, and when she felt satisfied with her information she hefted it in both hands to confirm that it did not weigh enough to bother with, and let it drop with a gesture of disdain.

「You are like a new-sprung rose,」 he said.

「I am waiting for your answer,」 he said.

Moreover, another episode of the intermittent civil war between Liberals and Conservatives had broken out that year, and the Captain had taken very strict precautions to maintain internal order and pro-tect the safety of the passengers. Trying to avoid misunderstandings and provocations, he prohibited the favorite pastime during river voyages in those days, which was to shoot the alligators sunning themselves on the broad sandy banks. Later on, when some of the pas-sengers divided into two opposing camps during an argument, he con-fiscated everyone』s weapons and gave his word of honor that they would be returned at the end of the journey. He was inflexible even with the British minister who, on the morning following their de-parture, appeared in a hunting outfit, with a precision carbine and a double-barreled rifle for killing tigers.

The case should have been considered closed. But on Tuesday of the following week, without being called and with no prior announcement, Dr. Juvenal Urbino returned to the house at the inconvenient hour of three in the afternoon. Fermina Daza was in the sewing room, having a lesson in oil painting with two of her friends, when he appeared at the window in his spotless white frock coat and his white top hat and signaled to her to come over to him. She put her palette down on a chair and tiptoed to the window, her ruffled skirt raised to keep it from dragging on the floor. She wore a diadem with a jewel that hung on her forehead, and the luminous stone was the same aloof color as her eyes, and everything in her breathed an aura of coolness. The Doctor was struck by the fact that she was dressed for painting at home as if she were going to a party. He took her pulse through the open window, he had her stick out her tongue, he examined her throat with an aluminum tongue de-pressor, he looked inside her lower eyelids, and each time he nodded in approval. He was less inhibited than on the previous visit, but she was more so, because she could not understand the reason for the unexpected examination if he himself had said that he would not come back unless they called him because of some change. And even more important: she did not ever want to see him again. When he finished his examination, the Doctor put the tongue depressor back into his bag, crowded with instruments and bottles of medicine, and closed it with a resounding snap.

He began to unlace his own boots, and Hildebranda accepted the challenge. It was not easy for her to do because the stays in the corset did not allow her to bend, but Dr. Urbino dallied until she took her boots out from under her skirt with a triumphant laugh, as if she had just fished them out of a pond. Then both of them looked at Fermina and saw her magnificent golden oriole』s profile sharper than ever against the blaze of the setting sun. She was furious for three reasons: because of the undeserved situation in which she found herself, be-cause of Hildebranda』s libertine behavior, and because she was certain that the carriage was driving in circles in order to postpone their arrival. But Hildebranda had lost all restraint.

The first thing he did was to take possession of his father』s office. He kept in place the hard, somber English furniture made of wood that sighed in the icy cold of dawn, but he consigned to the attic the treatises on viceregal science and romantic medicine and filled the bookshelves behind their glass doors with the writings of the new French school. He took down the faded pictures, except for the one of the physician arguing with Death for the nude body of a female patient, and the Hippocratic Oath printed in Gothic letters, and he hung in their place, next to his father』s only diploma, the many diverse ones he himself had received with highest honors from various schools in Europe.

「Save that powder for when the Liberals come,」 he said with good humor. 「We are no longer in the Middle Ages.」

So she had returned. She came back without any reason to repent of the sudden change she had made in her life. On the contrary, she had fewer and fewer such reasons, above all after surviving the diffi-culties of the early years, which was especially admirable in her case, for she had come to her wedding night still trailing clouds of inno-cence. She had begun to lose them during her journey through Cousin Hildebranda』s province. In Valledupar she realized at last why the roosters chase the hens, she witnessed the brutal ceremony of the burros, she watched the birth of calves, and she listened to her cousins talking with great naturalness about which couples in the family still made love and which ones had stopped, and when, and why, even though they continued to live together.

The third letter in October had been slipped under the street door, and was in every way different from the previous ones. The handwriting was so childish that there was no doubt it had been scrawled with the left hand, but Fermina Daza did not realize that until the text itself proved to be a poison pen letter. Whoever had written it took for granted that Fermina Daza had bewitched Dr. Juvenal Urbino with her love potions, and from that supposition sinister conclusions had been drawn. It ended with a threat: if Fermina Daza did not renounce her efforts to move up in the world by means of the most desirable man in the city, she would be exposed to public disgrace.

It was fortunate that unforeseen circumstances, combined with her husband』s understanding, resolved the first three nights without pain. It was providential. The ship of the Compagnie Générale Trans-atlantique, its itinerary upset by bad weather in the Caribbean, an-nounced only three days in advance that its departure had been moved ahead by twenty-four hours, so that it would not sail for La Rochelle on the day following the wedding, as had been planned for the past six months, but on that same night. No one believed that the change was not another of the many elegant surprises the wedding had to offer, for the reception ended after midnight on board the brightly lit ocean liner, with a Viennese orchestra that was premiering the most recent waltzes by Johann Strauss on this voyage. So that various members of the wedding party, soggy with champagne, had to be dragged ashore by their long-suffering wives when they began to ask the stewards if there were any free cabins so they could continue the celebration all the way to Paris. The last to leave saw Lorenzo Daza outside the port taverns, sitting on the ground in the middle of the street, his tuxedo in ruins. He was crying with tremendous loud wails, the way Arabs cry for their dead, sitting in a trickle of fouled water that might well have been a pool of tears.

「Music is important for one』s health,」 he said.

He had seen everything from the upper floor and, swollen and livid, he came down the stairs buttoning his shirt, his side-whiskers still in an uproar after a restless siesta. The Doctor tried to overcome his embarrassment.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say that he experienced no emotion when he met the woman with whom he would live until the day of his death. He remembered the sky-blue chemise edged in lace, the feverish eyes, the long hair hanging loose over her shoulders, but he was so concerned with the outbreak of cholera in the colonial district that he took no notice of her flowering adolescence: he had eyes only for the slightest hint that she might be a victim of the plague. She was more explicit: 九*九*藏*書the young doctor she had heard so much about in connection with the cholera epidemic seemed a pedant incapable of loving anyone but himself. The diagnosis was an in-testinal infection of alimentary origin, which was cured by three days of treatment at home. Relieved by this proof that his daughter had not contracted cholera, Lorenzo Daza accompanied Dr. Juvenal Urbino to the door of his carriage, paid him a gold peso for the visit, a fee that seemed excessive even for a physician to the rich, and he said goodbye with immoderate expressions of gratitude. He was overwhelmed by the splendor of the Doctor』s family names, and he not only did not hide it but would have done anything to see him again, under less formal circumstances.

「We are ruined,」 he said. 「Total ruin, so now you know.」

Florentino Ariza had not wanted to take it, for he thought it would be useless in a cabin that provided bed and bed-clothes, but from the very first night he had reason once again to be grateful for his mother』s good sense. At the last moment, a passenger dressed in evening clothes boarded the boat; he had arrived early that morning on a ship from Europe and was accompanied by the Pro-vincial Governor himself. He wanted to continue his journey without delay, along with his wife and daughter and liveried servant and seven trunks with gold fittings, which were almost too bulky for the stair-way. To accommodate the unexpected travelers, the Captain, a giant from Cura?ao, called on the passengers』 indigenous sense of patrio-tism. In a jumble of Spanish and Cura?ao patois, he explained to Floren-tino Ariza that the man in evening dress was the new plenipotentiary from England, on his way to the capital of the Republic; he reminded him of how that kingdom had provided us with decisive resources in our struggle for independence from Spanish rule, and that as a con-sequence no sacrifice was too great if it would allow a family of such distinction to feel more at home in our country than in their own. Florentino Ariza, of course, gave up his cabin.

「Shit,」 he murmured in his sleep, 「the dead have died.」 His mother and sisters were having café con leche and crullers for supper at the formal table in the large dining room when they saw him appear in the door, his face haggard and his entire being dishonored by the whorish perfume of the crows. The largest bell of the adjacent Cathedral resounded in the immense empty space of the house. His mother asked him in alarm where in the world he had been, for they had looked everywhere for him so that he could attend General Ignacio María, the last grandson of the Marquis de Jaraíz de la Vera, who had been struck down that afternoon by a cerebral hemorrhage: it was for him that the bells were tolling. Dr. Juvenal Urbino listened to his mother without hearing her as he clutched the doorframe, and then he gave a half turn, trying to reach his bedroom, but he fell flat on his face in an explosion of star anise vomit.

They also brought back three indelible memories: the unprece-dented opening of The Tales of Hoffmann in Paris, the terrifying blaze that destroyed almost all the gondolas off St. Mark』s Square in Venice, which they witnessed with grieving hearts from the window of their hotel, and their fleeting glimpse of Oscar Wilde during the first snow-fall in January. But amid these and so many other memories, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had one that he always regretted not sharing with his wife, for it came from his days as a bachelor student in Paris. It was the memory of Victor Hugo, who enjoyed an impassioned fame here that had nothing to do with his books, because someone said that he had said, although no one actually heard him say it, that our Constitution was meant for a nation not of men but of angels. From that time on, special homage was paid to him, and most of our many com-patriots who traveled to France went out of their way to see him. A half-dozen students, among them Juvenal Urbino, stood guard for a time outside his residence on Avenue Eylau, and at the cafés where it was said he came without fail and never came, and at last they sent a written request for a private audience in the name of the angels of the Constitution of Rionegro.

「True enough,」 said Lorenzo Daza, 「but one with too many thorns.」

One night, a short while after the serenade by solo piano, Lorenzo Daza discovered a letter, its envelope sealed with wax, in the entryway to his house. It was addressed to his daughter and the monogram 「J.U.C.」 was imprinted on the seal. He slipped it under the door as he passed Fermina』s bedroom, and she never understood how it had come there, since it was inconceivable to her that her father had changed so much that he would bring her a letter from a suitor. She left it on the night table, for the truth was she did not know what to do with it, and there it stayed, unopened, for several days, until one rainy afternoon when Fermina Daza dreamed that Juvenal Urbino had returned to the house to give her the tongue depressor he had used to examine her throat. In the dream, the tongue depressor was made not of aluminum but of a delicious metal that she had tasted with pleasure in other dreams, so that she broke it in two unequal pieces and gave him the smaller one.

「He is ugly and sad,」 she said to Fermina Daza, 「but he is all love.」

The Archbishop did not come. So the siege might have ended that day if Hildebranda Sánchez had not arrived to spend Christmas with her cousin, and life changed for both of them. They met her on the schooner from Riohacha at five o』clock in the morning, surrounded by a crowd of passengers half dead from seasickness, but she walked off the boat radiant, very much a woman, and excited after the bad night at sea. She arrived with crates of live turkeys and all the fruits of her fertile lands so that no one would lack for food during her visit. Lisímaco Sánchez, her father, sent a message asking if they needed musicians for their holiday parties, because he had the best at his disposal, and he promised to send a load of fireworks later on. He also announced that he could not come for his daughter before March, so there was plenty of time for them to enjoy life.

That was when she was initiated into solitary love, with the strange sensation of discovering something that her instincts had always known, first in bed, holding her breath so she would not give herself away in the bedroom she shared with half a dozen cousins, and then, with eagerness and un-concern, sprawling on the bathroom floor, her hair loose, smoking her first mule drivers』 cigarette. She always did it with certain pangs of conscience, which she could overcome only after she was married, and always in absolute secrecy, although her cousins boasted to each other not only about the number of orgasms they had in one day but even about their form and size. But despite those bewitching first rites, she was still burdened by the belief that the loss of virginity was a bloody sacrifice.

He did not return to the telegraph office. His only interest seemed to be the serialized love novels and the volumes of the Popular Library that his mother continued to buy for him and that he continued to read again and again, lying in his hammock, until he learned them by heart. He did not even ask for his violin. He reestablished relations with his closest friends, and sometimes they played billiards or con-versed in the outdoor cafés under the arches around the Plaza of the Cathedral, but he did not go back to the Saturday night dances: he could not conceive of them without her.

After six months of furious lovemaking with the Widow Nazaret, Florentino Ariza himself was convinced that he had survived the torment of Fermina Daza. He not only believed it, he also discussed it several times with Tránsito Ariza during the two years of Fermina Daza』s wedding trip, and he continued to believe it with a feeling of boundless freedom until one fateful Sunday when, with no warning and no presentiments, he saw her leaving High Mass on her husband』s arm, besieged by the curiosity and flattery of her new world. The same ladies from fine families who at first had scorned and ridiculed her for being an upstart without a name went out of their way to make her feel like one of them, and she intoxicated them with her charm. She had assumed the condition of woman of the world to such per-fection that Florentino Ariza needed a moment of reflection to recog-nize her.

「I adore you because you made me a whore.」

He said it for no apparent reason, and the angel of death hovered for a moment in the cool shadows of the office and flew out again through the window, leaving a trail of feathers fluttering in his wake, but the boy did not see them. More than twenty years had gone by since then, and Juvenal Urbino would very soon be as old as his father was that afternoon. He knew he was identical to him, and to that awareness had now been added the awful consciousness that he was also as mortal.

The bay was calm at daybreak. Above the floating mist Florentino Ariza saw the dome of the Cathedral, gilded by the first light of dawn, he saw the dovecotes on the flat roofs, and orienting himself by them, he located the balcony of the palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, where he supposed that the lady of his misfortune was still dozing, her head on the shoulder of her satiated husband. That idea broke his heart, but he did nothing to suppress it; on the con-trary, he took pleasure in his pain. The sun was beginning to grow hot as the mail sloop made its way through the labyrinth of sailing ships that lay at anchor where the countless odors from the public market and the decaying matter on the bottom of the bay blended into one pestilential stench. The schooner from Riohacha had just arrived, and gangs of stevedores in water up to their waists lifted the passengers over the side and carried them to shore. Florentino Ariza was the first to jump on land from the mail sloop, and from that time on he no longer detected the fetid reek of the bay in the city, but was aware only of the personal fragrance of Fermina Daza. Everything smelled of her.

「If I died now,」 he said, 「you would hardly remember me when you are my age.」

They stayed in Europe, with Paris as their base, and made short trips to neighboring countries. During that time they made love every day, more than once on winter Sundays when they frolicked in bed until it was time for lunch. He was a man of strong impulses, and well disciplined besides, and she was not one to let anyone take advantage of her, so they had to be content with sharing power in bed. After three months of feverish lovemaking he concluded that one of them was sterile, and they both submitted to rigorous examinations at the H?pital de la Salpêtrière, where he had been an intern. It was an arduous but fruitless effort. However, when they least expected it, and with no scientific intervention, the miracle occurred. When they returned home, Fermina was in the sixth month of her pregnancy and thought herself the happiest woman on earth. The child they had both longed for was born without incident under the sign of Aquarius and baptized in honor of the grandfather who had died of cholera.

「Mother of God,」 shouted his mother. 「Something very strange must have happened for you to show up in your own house in this state.」

「I have never been able to understand how that thing works,」 she said.

Shaken by the conviction that God was present, Dr. Juvenal Urbino thought that such a house was immune to the plague. He followed Gala Placidia along the arcaded corridor, passed by the window of the sewing room where Florentino Ariza had seen Fermina Daza for the first time, when the patio was still a shambles, climbed the new marble stairs to the second floor, and waited to be announced before going into the patient』s bedroom. But Gala Pla-cidia came out again with a message:

That was all he said, and he never said it again, and nothing happened to indicate whether he had told the truth, but after that night Fermina Daza knew that she was alone in the world. She lived in a social limbo. Her former schoolmates were in a heaven that was closed to her, above all after the dishonor of her expulsion, and she was not a neighbor to her neighbors, because they had known her without a past, in the uniform of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin. Her father』s world was one of traders and stevedores, of war refugees in the public shelter of the Parish Café, of solitary men. In the last year the painting classes had alleviated her seclusion somewhat, for the teacher preferred group classes and would bring the other pupils to the sewing room. But they were girls of varying and undefined social circumstances, and for Fermina Daza they were no more than borrowed friends whose affection ended with each class. Hildebranda wanted to open the house, air it, bring in her father』s musicians and fireworks and castles of gun-powder, and have a Carnival dance whose gale winds would clear out her cousin』s moth-eaten spirit, but she soon realized that her proposals were to no avail, and for a very simple reason: there was no one to invite.

「Besides, I think it has too many things on it,」 she said.

Tránsito Ariza knew that world, although this was the only time it caused her suffering in her own person, and she knew that her clients always reappeared on the eve of great parties to ask her please to dig down into her jars and lend them their pawned jewels for only twenty-four hours in exchange for the payment of additional interest. It had been a long while since this had occurred to the extent it did now, the jars emp-tied so that the ladies with long last names could emerge from their shadowy sanctuaries and, radiant in their own borrowed jewels, appear at a wedding more splendid than any that would be seen for the rest of the century and whose ultimate glory was the sponsorship of Dr. Rafael Nú?ez, three times President of the Republic, philoso-pher, poet, and author of the words to the national anthem, as anyone could learn, from that time on, in some of the more recent dictionaries. Fermina Daza came to the main altar of the Cathedral on the arm of her father, whose formal dress lent him, for the day, an ambiguous air of respectability.

He liked to say that this love was the result of a clinical error. He himself could not believe that it had happened, least of all at that time in his life when all his reserves of passion were concentrated on the destiny of his city which, he said with great frequency and no second thoughts, had no equal in the world. In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden after-noons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kissing on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that the heart』s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.

「It』s life over there, Mother,」 he said. 「You turn green in Paris.」

He knew that she was to have an elaborate wedding, and then the being who loved her most, who would love her forever, would not even have the right to die for her. Jealousy, which until that time had been drowned in weeping, took possession of his soul. He prayed to God that the lightning of divine justice would strike Fermina Daza as she was about to give her vow of love and obedience to a man who wanted her for his wife only as a social adornment, and he went into rapture at the vision of the bride, his bride or no one』s, lying face up on the flagstones of the Cathedral, her orange blossoms laden with the dew of death, and the foaming torrent of her veil covering the funerary marbles of the fourteen bishops who were buried in front of the main altar. Once his revenge was consummated, however, he repented of his own wickedness, and then he saw Fermina Daza rising from the ground, her spirit intact, distant but alive, because it was not possible for him to imagine the world without her.

She did not permit herself the vulgarity of remorse. On the con-trary. Kept awake by the gunfire whizzing over the roofs, she con-tinued to evoke her husband』s excellent qualities until daybreak, not reproaching him for any disloyalty other than his having died without her, which was mitigated by her conviction that he had never belonged to her as much as he did now that he was in the coffin nailed shut with a dozen three-inch nails and two meters under the ground.

Cholera became an obsession for him. He did not know much more about it than he had learned in a routine manner in some marginal course, when he had found it difficult to believe that only thirty years before, it had been responsible for more than one hundred forty thousand deaths in France, including Paris. But after the death of his father he learned all there was to know about the different forms of cholera, almost as a penance to appease his memory, and he studied with the most outstanding epidemiologist of his time and the creator of the cordons sanitaires, Professor Adrien Proust, father of the great novelist. So that when he returned to his country and smelled the stench of the market while he was still out at sea and saw the rats in the sewers and the children rolling naked in the puddles on the streets, he not only understood how the tragedy had occurred but was certain that it would be repeated at any moment.

It was a brief and bitter visit. Sister Franca de la Luz, wasting no time on formalities, offered honorable reinstatement to Fermina Daza. The reason for her expulsion would be erased not only from the records but also from the memory of the Community, and this would allow her to finish her studies and receive her baccalaureate degree. Fermina Daza was perplexed and wanted to know why.

She was another person: the composure of an older woman, the high boots, the hat with the veil and colored plume from some Oriental bird--everything about her was distinctive and confident, as if it had been hers from birth. He found her more beautiful and youthful than ever, but more lost to him than she had ever been, although he did not understand why until he saw the curve of her belly under the silk tunic: she was in her sixth month of pregnancy. But what impressed him most was that she and her husband made an admirable couple, and both of them negotiated the world with so much fluidity that they seemed to float above the pitfalls of reality. Flor-entino Ariza did not feel either jealousy or rage--only great con-tempt for himself. He felt poor, ugly, inferior, and unworthy not only of her but of any other woman on the face of the earth.

Fermina Daza』s anger grew more intense at the idea that her father was an accessory to the visit.

Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino, the father of Juvenal, was a civic hero during that dreadful time, as well as its most distinguished victim. By official decree he personally designed and directed public health measures, but on his own initiative he intervened to such an extent in every social question that during the most critical moments of the plague no higher authority seemed to exist. Years later, re-viewing the chronicle of those days, Dr. Juvenal Urbino confirmed that his father』s methodology had been more charitable than scientific and, in many ways, contrary to reason, so that in large measure it had fostered the voraciousness of the plague. He confirmed this with the compassion of sons whom life has turned, little by little, into the fathers of their fathers, and for the first time he regretted not having stood with his father in the solitude of his errors. But he did not dispute his merits: his diligence and his self-sacrifice and above all his personal courage deserved the many honors rendered him when the city recovered from the disaster, and it was with justice that his name was found among those of so many other heroes of less honor-able wars.

Dr. Urbino felt her slide in next to him like a startled little animal, trying to keep as far away as possible in a bunk where it was difficult for two people to be together without touching. He took her hand, cold and twitching with terror, he entwined his fingers with hers, and almost in a whisper he began to recount his recollections of other ocean voyages. She was tense again because when she came back to bed she realized that he had taken off all his clothes while she was in the bathroom, which revived her terror of what was to come. But what was to come took several hours, for Dr. Urbino continued talking very slowly as he won her body』s confidence millimeter by millimeter.

「I am waiting,」 said the Doctor.

The Widow Nazaret never missed her occasional appointments with Florentino Ariza, not even during her busiest times, and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love. Sometimes he went to her house, and then they liked to sit on the sea terrace, drenched by salt spray, watching the dawn of the whole world on the horizon. With all his perseverance, he tried to teach her the tricks he had seen others perform through the peepholes in the transient hotel, along with the theoretical formulations preached by Lotario Thugut on his nights of debauchery.

「We saw each other twice when I was sick,」 she said. 「Now there is no reason for us to see each other again.」

「If you cross that street,」 he said to her, 「when you get back here you will find me dead.」

「Come here and beg the Doctor』s pardon.」

From breakfast until bedtime she was busy with him in the salon, while the other two played Chinese checkers, and when at last she managed to put him to sleep she would hang the wicker cage from the ceiling on the cooler side of the railing. She did not ignore him, however, even when he was asleep, but would rock the cage, singing love songs under her breath while her thoughts flew high above the miseries of the journey. Florentino Ariza clung to the illusion that sooner or later she would betray herself, if only with a gesture. He even observed the changes in her breathing, watching the reliquary that hung on her batiste blouse as he looked at her without dissimulation over the book he pretended to read, and he committed the calculated imperti-nence of changing his seat in the dining room so that he would face her. But he could not find the slightest hint that she was in fact the repository of the other half of his secret. The only thing of hers he had, and that only because her younger companion called to her, was her first name: Rosalba.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino imitated her with good humor, making a cavalier』s flourish with his top hat, but he did not win the compas-sionate smile he had hoped for. Then Lorenzo Daza invited him to have a cup of coffee in九-九-藏-書 his office to set things right, and he accepted with pleasure so that there would be no doubt whatsoever that he did not harbor a shred of resentment in his heart.

Then he pulled down the sheet and she not only did not object but kicked it away from the bunk with a rapid movement of her feet because she could no longer bear the heat. Her body was undulant and elastic, much more serious than it appeared when dressed, with its own scent of a forest animal, which distinguished her from all the other women in the world. Defenseless in the light, she felt a rush of blood surge up to her face, and the only way she could think of to hide it was to throw her arms around her husband』s neck and give him a hard, thorough kiss that lasted until they were both gasping for breath.

It was after seven o』clock when he left the office, preceded by Lorenzo Daza. There was a full moon. The patio, idealized by anisette, floated at the bottom of an aquarium, and the cages covered with cloths looked like ghosts sleeping under the hot scent of new orange blossoms. The sewing room window was open, there was a lighted lamp on the worktable, and the unfinished paintings were on their easels as if they were on exhibit. 「Where art thou that thou art not here,」 said Dr. Urbino as he passed by, but Fermina Daza did not hear him, she could not hear him, because she was crying with rage in her bedroom, lying face down on the bed and waiting for her father so that she could make him pay for the afternoon』s humiliation. The Doctor did not renounce his hope of saying goodbye to her, but Lorenzo Daza did not suggest it. He yearned for the innocence of her pulse, her cat』s tongue, her tender tonsils, but he was disheartened by the idea that she never wanted to see him again and would never permit him to try to see her. When Lorenzo Daza walked into the entryway, the crows, awake under their sheets, emitted a funereal shriek. 「They will peck out your eyes,」 the Doctor said aloud, thinking of her, and Lorenzo Daza turned around to ask him what he had said.

The two cousins began at once. From the first afternoon they bathed together, naked, the two of them making their reciprocal ablutions with water from the cistern. They soaped each other, they removed each other』s nits, they compared their buttocks, their quiet breasts, each looking at herself in the other』s mirror to judge with what cruelty time had treated them since the last occasion when they had seen each other undressed. Hildebranda was large and solid, with golden skin, but all the hair on her body was like a mulatta』s, as short and curly as steel wool. Fermina Daza, on the other hand, had a pale nakedness, with long lines, serene skin, and straight hair. Gala Placidia had two identical beds placed in the bedroom, but at times they lay together in one and talked in the dark until dawn. They smoked long, thin highwaymen』s cigars that Hildebranda had hidden in the lining of her trunk, and afterward they had to burn Armenian paper to purify the rank smell they left behind in the bedroom. Fermina Daza had smoked for the first time in Valledupar, and had continued in Fonseca and Riohacha, where as many as ten cousins would lock themselves in a room to talk about men and to smoke.

Despite the tangle of clues, Florentino Ariza soon rejected the possibility that the oldest had been the perpetrator of the assault, and with as much dispatch he also absolved the youngest, who was the most beautiful and the boldest of the three. He did so without valid reasons, but only because his avid observations of the three women had persuaded him to accept as truth the profound hope that his sudden lover was in fact the mother of the caged infant. That supposition was so seductive that he began to think about her with more intensity than he thought about Fermina Daza, ignoring the evidence that this recent mother lived only for her child. She was no more than twenty-five, she was slender and golden, she had Portuguese eyelids that made her seem even more aloof, and any man would have been satisfied with only the crumbs of the tenderness that she lavished on her son.

And so he returned at five in the afternoon, in accordance with the maid』s instructions, and Lorenzo Daza himself opened the street door and led him to his daughter』s bedroom. There he remained, sitting in a dark corner with his arms folded, and making futile efforts to control his ragged breathing during the examination. It was not easy to know who was more constrained, the doctor with his chaste touch or the patient in the silk chemise with her virgin』s modesty, but neither one looked the other in the eye; instead, he asked questions in an impersonal voice and she responded in a tremulous voice, both of them very conscious of the man sitting in the shadows. At last Dr. Juvenal Urbino asked the patient to sit up, and with exquisite care he opened her nightdress down to the waist; her pure high breasts with the childish nipples shone for an instant in the darkness of the bedroom, like a flash of gunpowder, before she hurried to cover them with crossed arms. Imperturbable, the physician opened her arms without looking at her and examined her by direct ausculta-tion, his ear against her skin, first the chest and then the back.

He had never traveled before. He had with him a tin trunk with his clothes for the mountain wastelands, the illustrated novels that he bought in pamphlet form every month and that he himself sewed into cardboard covers, and the books of love poetry that he recited from memory and that were about to crumble into dust with so much reading. He had left behind his violin, for he identified it too closely with his misfortune, but his mother had obliged him to take his petate, a very popular and practical bedroll, with its pillow, sheet, small pewter chamber pot, and mosquito netting, all of this wrapped in straw matting tied with two hemp ropes for hanging a hammock in an emergency.

The former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, historic resi-dence of the Urbino de la Calle family, had not escaped the surround-ing wreckage. Dr. Juvenal Urbino discovered this with a broken heart when he entered the house through the gloomy portico and saw the dusty fountain in the interior garden and the wild brambles in flower beds where iguanas wandered, and he realized that many marble flagstones were missing and others were broken on the huge stairway with its copper railings that led to the principal rooms. His father, a physician who was more self-sacrificing than eminent, had died in the epidemic of Asian cholera that had devastated the population six years earlier, and with him had died the spirit of the house. Do?a Blanca, his mother, smothered by mourning that was considered eternal, had substituted evening novenas for her dead husband』s celebrated lyrical soirées and chamber concerts. His two sisters, despite their natural inclinations and festive vocation, were fodder for the convent.

「Thank you.」

When Florentino Ariza learned that Fermina Daza was going to marry a physician with family and fortune, educated in Europe and with an extraordinary reputation for a man of his years, there was no power on earth that could raise him from his prostration. Tránsito Ariza did all she could and more, using all the stratagems of a sweet-heart to console him when she realized that he had lost his speech and his appetite and was spending nights on end in constant weeping, and by the end of the week he was eating again. Then she spoke to Don Leo XII Loayza, the only one of the three brothers who was still alive, and without telling him the reason, she pleaded with him to give his nephew any job at all in the navigation company, as long as it was in a port lost in the jungle of the Magdalena, where there was no mail and no telegraph and no one who would tell him anything about this damnable city. His uncle did not give him the job out of deference to his brother』s widow, for she could not bear the very existence of her husband』s illegitimate son, but he did find him employment as a telegraph operator in Villa de Leyva, a dreamy city more than twenty days』 journey away and almost three thousand meters above the level of the Street of Windows.

The restrictions became even more drastic above the port of Tenerife, where they passed a boat flying the yellow plague flag. The Captain could not obtain any fur-ther information regarding that alarming sign because the other vessel did not respond to his signals. But that same day they encountered another boat, with a cargo of cattle for Jamaica, and were informed that the vessel with the plague flag was carrying two people sick with cholera, and that the epidemic was wreaking havoc along the portion of the river they still had to travel. Then the passengers were pro-hibited from leaving the boat, not only in the ports but even in the uninhabited places where they stopped to take on wood. So that until they reached the final port, a trip of six days, the passengers acquired the habits of prisoners, including the pernicious contemplation of a packet of pornographic Dutch postcards that circulated from hand to hand without anyone』s knowing where it came from, although no veteran of the river was unaware that this was only a tiny sampling of the Captain』s legendary collection. But, in the end, even that dis-traction with no expectation only increased the tedium.

「Nothing could be simpler,」 said Dr. Urbino. 「Let us see who finishes first.」

She bought only one hat from Madame Reboux, but on the other hand she filled a trunk with sprigs of artificial cherries, stalks of all the felt flowers she could find, branches of ostrich plumes, crests of peacocks, tailfeathers of Asiatic roosters, entire pheasants, hummingbirds, and a countless variety of exotic birds preserved in midflight, midcall, midagony: everything that had been used in the past twenty years to change the appearance of hats. She brought back a collection of fans from countries all over the world, each one appropriate to a different occasion. She brought back a disturbing fragrance chosen from many at the perfume shop in the Bazar de la Charité, before the spring winds leveled everything with ashes, but she used it only once because she did not recognize herself in the new scent. She also brought back a cosmetic case that was the latest thing in seductiveness, and she took it to parties at a time when the simple act of checking one』s makeup in public was considered indecent.

He understood her reasoning, and from then on they each prac-ticed the same religion in their own way. They had had a brief engage-ment, but a rather informal one for that time: Dr. Urbino had visited her in her house, without a chaperone, every day at sunset. She would not have permitted him to touch even her fingertips before the episcopal blessing, but he had not attempted to. It was on the first calm night, when they were in bed but still dressed, that he began his first caresses with so much care that his suggestion that she put on her nightdress seemed natural to her. She went into the bathroom to change, but first she turned out the lights in the stateroom, and when she came out in her chemise she covered the cracks around the door with articles of clothing so she could return to bed in absolute dark-ness. As she did so, she said with good humor:

That night she stopped wearing mourning once and for all, with-out passing through the useless intermediate stage of blouses with little gray flowers, and her life was filled with love songs and pro-vocative dresses decorated with macaws and spotted butterflies, and she began to share her body with anyone who cared to ask for it. When the troops of General Gaitán Obeso were defeated after a sixty-three-day siege, she rebuilt the house that had been damaged by cannon fire, adding a beautiful sea terrace that overlooked the breakwater where the surf would vent its fury during the stormy season. That was her love nest, as she called it without irony, where she would receive only men she liked, when she liked, how she liked, and without charg-ing one red cent, because in her opinion it was the men who were doing her the favor. In a very few cases she would accept a gift, as long as it was not made of gold, and she managed everything with so much skill that no one could have presented conclusive evidence of improper conduct. On only one occasion did she hover on the edge of public scandal, when the rumor circulated that Archbishop Dante de Luna had not died by accident after eating a plate of poisonous mushrooms but had eaten them intentionally because she threatened to expose him if he persisted in his sacrilegious solicitations. As she used to say between peals of laughter, she was the only free woman in the province.

「No,」 he said. 「This is going to be a lesson in love.」

Dr. Urbino knew enough about women to realize that Fermina Daza would not pass by the office until he left, but he stayed never-theless because he felt that wounded pride would give him no peace after the humiliations of the afternoon. Lorenzo Daza, who by now was almost drunk, did not seem to notice his lack of attention, for he was satisfied with his own indomitable eloquence. He talked at full gallop, chewing the flower of his unlit cigar, coughing in shouts, trying to clear his throat, attempting with great difficulty to find a comfortable position in the swivel chair, whose springs wailed like an animal in heat. He had drunk three glasses of anisette to each one drunk by his guest, and he paused only when he realized that they could no longer see each other, and he stood up to light the lamp. Dr. Juvenal Urbino looked at him in the new light, he saw that one eye was twisted like a fish』s and that his words did not correspond to the movement of his lips, and he thought these were hallucinations brought on by his abuse of alcohol. Then he stood up, with the fascinating sensation that he was inside a body that belonged not to him but to someone who was still in the chair where he had been sitting, and he had to make a great effort not to lose his mind.

It was something natural in her. Before she had been married a year, she moved through the world with the same assurance that had been hers as a little girl in the wilds of San Juan de la Ciénaga, as if she had been born with it, and she had a facility for dealing with strangers that left her husband dumbfounded, and a mysterious talent for making herself understood in Spanish with anyone, anywhere. 「You have to know languages when you go to sell something,」 she said with mocking laughter. 「But when you go to buy, everyone does what he must to understand you.」 It was difficult to imagine anyone who could have assimilated the daily life of Paris with so much speed and so much joy, and who learned to love her memory of it despite the eternal rain. Nevertheless, when she returned home overwhelmed by so many experiences, tired of traveling, drowsy with her preg-nancy, the first thing she was asked in the port was what she thought of the marvels of Europe, and she summed up many months of bliss with four words of Caribbean slang:

They dressed as if they were traveling on a fashionable ocean liner, with bustles under their silk skirts and lace gorgets and broad-brimmed hats trimmed with crinoline flowers, and the two younger women changed their entire outfits several times a day, so that they seemed to carry with them their own springlike ambience while the other passengers were suffocating in the heat. All three were skilled in the use of parasols and feathered fans, but their intentions were as indecipherable as those of other women from Mompox. Florentino Anza could not even determine their relationship to one another, although he had no doubt they came from the same family. At first he thought that the older one might be the mother of the other two, but then he realized she was not old enough for that, and that she also wore partial mourning that the others did not share. He could not imagine that one of them would have dared to do what she did while the others were sleeping in the nearby bunks, and the only reasonable supposition was that she had taken advantage of a for-tuitous, or perhaps prearranged, moment when she was alone in the cabin. He observed that at times two of them stayed out for a breath of cool air until very late, while the third remained behind, caring for the infant, but one night when it was very hot all three of them left the cabin, carrying the baby, who was asleep in the wicker cage covered with gauze.

Uncle Leo XII gave him two serge suits and a pair of waterproof boots that had belonged to his older brother, and he also gave him cabin passage on the next boat. Tránsito Ariza altered the clothing and made it smaller for her son, who was less corpulent than his father and much shorter than the German, and she bought him woolen socks and long underwear so that he would have everything he needed to resist the rigors of the mountain wastelands. Florentino Ariza, hardened by so much suffering, attended to the preparations for his journey as if he were a dead man attending to the preparations for his own funeral. The same iron hermeticism with which he had revealed to no one but his mother the secret of his repressed passion meant that he did not tell anyone he was going away and did not say goodbye to anyone, but on the eve of his departure he committed, with full awareness, a final mad act of the heart that might well have cost him his life.

A short while later, suffocating with the heat as he sat next to her in the closed carriage, he could no longer endure the unmerciful reality that came pouring in through the window. The ocean looked like ashes, the old palaces of the marquises were about to succumb to a proliferation of beggars, and it was impossible to discern the ardent scent of jasmine behind the vapors of death from the open sewers. Everything seemed smaller to him than when he left, poorer and sadder, and there were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps of the streets that the carriage horses stumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house, located in the heart of the District of the Viceroys, he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia. Defeated, he turned his head away so that his mother would not see, and he began to cry in silence.

Florentino Ariza endured the hardships of the journey -with the mineral patience that had brought sorrow to his mother and exaspera-tion to his friends. He spoke to no one. The days were easy for him as he sat at the rail, watching the motionless alligators sunning them-selves on sandy banks, their mouths open to catch butterflies, watch-ing the flocks of startled herons that rose without warning from the marshes, the manatees that nursed their young at large maternal teats and startled the passengers with their woman』s cries. On a single day he saw three bloated, green, human corpses float past, with buzzards sitting on them. First the bodies of two men went by, one of them without a head, and then a very young girl, whose medusan locks undulated in the boat』s wake. He never knew, because no one ever knew, if they were victims of the cholera or the war, but the nauseat-ing stench contaminated his memory of Fermina Daza.

One night when he stopped his reading earlier than usual and was walking, distracted, toward the toilets, a door opened as he passed through the dining room, and a hand like the talon of a hawk seized him by the shirt sleeve and pulled him into a cabin. In the darkness he could barely see the naked woman, her ageless body soaked in hot perspiration, her breathing heavy, who pushed him onto the bunk face up, unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his trousers, impaled herself on him as if she were riding horseback, and stripped him, without glory, of his virginity. Both of them fell, in an agony of desire, into the void of a bottomless pit that smelled of a salt marsh full of prawns. Then she lay for a moment on top of him, gasping for breath, and she ceased to exist in the darkness.

As a consolation, Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza brought back the shared memory of a snowy afternoon when they were intrigued by a crowd that defied the storm outside a small bookshop on the Boulevard des Capucines because Oscar Wilde was inside. When he came out at last, elegant indeed but perhaps too conscious of being so, the group surrounded him, asking that he sign their books. Dr. Urbino had stopped just to watch him, but his impulsive wife wanted to cross the boulevard so that he could sign the only thing she thought appropriate, given the fact that she did not have a book: her beautiful gazelle-skin glove, long, smooth, soft, the same color as her newlywed』s skin. She was sure that a man as refined as he would appreciate the gesture. But her husband objected with firmness, and when she tried to go despite his arguments, he did not feel he could survive the embarrassment.

「I do not understand how you can lend yourself to this,」 she said, 「if you think that love is a sin.」

Then Fermina pulled harder and her empty glove was left dan-gling in the Doctor』s hand, but she did not wait to retrieve it. She went to bed without eating. Hildebranda, as if nothing had happened, came into the bedroom after her supper with Gala Placidia in the kitchen, and with her inborn wit, commented on the events of the afternoon. She did not attempt to hide her enthusiasm for Dr. Urbino, for his elegance and charm, and Fermina refused to comment, but was brim-ming with anger. At one point Hildebranda confessed that when Dr. Juvenal Urbino covered his eyes and she saw the splendor of his perfect teeth between his rosy lips, she had felt an irresistible desire to devour him with kisses. Fermina Daza turned to the wall and with no wish to offend, but smiling and with all her heart, put an end to the conversation:

On the upper deck were the bridge, the cabins of the Captain and his officers, and a recreation and dining room, where notable passengers were invited at least once to have dinner and play cards. On the middle deck were six first-class cabins on either side of a passage that served as a common dining room, and in the prow was a sitting room open to the river, with carved wood railings and iron columns, where most of the passengers hung their hammocks at night. Unlike the older boats, these did not have paddle wheels at the sides; instead, there was an enormous wheel with horizontal paddles at the stern, just underneath the suffocating toilets on the passenger deck. Florentino Ariza had not taken the trouble to explore the boat when he came aboard on a Sunday in July at seven o』clock in the morning, as those traveling for the first time did almost by instinct. He became aware of his new milieu only at dusk, as they were sailing past the hamlet of Calamar, when he went to the stern to urinate and saw, through the opening in the toilet, the gigantic paddle wheel turning under his feet with a volcanic display of foam and steam.

The blindfold emphasized the purity of his lips surrounded by his round black beard and his mustache with the waxed tips, and she felt herself shaken by a sudden surge of panic. She looked at Fermina, and now she saw that she was not furious but terrified that she might be capable of taking off her skirt. Hildebranda became serious and asked her in sign language: 「What shalｈｔtｐs://ｒeａd.９9cｓw.ｃoｍl we do?」 Fermina answered in the same code that if they did not go straight home she would throw herself out of the moving carriage.

He walked past Dr. Urbino without greeting him. He pushed open the sewing room window and shouted a rough command to his daughter:

「What is the point of that question?」 she asked in turn.

He was astounded. The original thesis of his dissertation had been just that: the advantage of simplifying the human organism. It seemed antiquated to him, with many useless or duplicated functions that had been essential in other stages of the human race but were not in ours. Yes: it could be more simple and by the same token less vulnerable. He concluded: 「It is something that only God can do, of course, but in any event it would be good to have it established in theoretical terms.」 She laughed with amusement and so much naturalness that he took advantage of the opportunity to embrace her and kiss her for the first time on the mouth. She responded, and he continued giving her very soft kisses on her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, while he slipped his hand under the sheet and caressed her flat, straight pubic hair: the pubic hair of a Japanese. She did not move his hand away, but she kept hers on the alert in the event that he took one step further.

Her sleep was restless; she saw Dr. Juvenal Urbino everywhere, she saw him laughing, singing, emitting sulfurous sparks from between his teeth with his eyes blindfolded, mocking her with a word game that had no fixed rules, driving up to the paupers』 cemetery in a different carriage. She awoke long before dawn and lay exhausted and wakeful, with her eyes closed, thinking of the countless years she still had to live. Later, while Hildebranda was bathing, she wrote a letter as quickly as possible, folded it as quickly as possible, put it in an envelope as quickly as possible, and before Hildebranda came out of the bathroom she had Gala Placidia deliver it to Dr. Juvenal Urbino. It was one of her typical letters, not a syllable too many or too few, in which she told the Doctor yes, he could speak to her father.

「The se?orita says you cannot come in now because her papa is not at home.」

It was, in fact, the result of a clinical error. A physician who was a friend of his thought he detected the warning symptoms of cholera in an eighteen-year-old patient, and he asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino to see her. He called that very afternoon, alarmed at the possibility that the plague had entered the sanctuary of the old city, for all the cases until that time had occurred in the poor neighborhoods, and almost all of those among the black population. He encountered other, less unpleasant, surprises. From the outside, the house, shaded by the almond trees in the Park of the Evangels, appeared to be in ruins, as did the others in the colonial district, but inside there was a harmony of beauty and an astonishing light that seemed to come from another age. The entrance opened directly into a square Sevillian patio that was white with a recent coat of lime and had flowering orange trees and the same tiles on the floor as on the walls. There was an in-visible sound of running water, and pots with carnations on the cornices, and cages of strange birds in the arcades. The strangest of all were three crows in a very large cage, who filled the patio with an ambiguous perfume every time they flapped their wings. Several dogs, chained elsewhere in the house, began to bark, maddened by the scent of a stranger, but a woman』s shout stopped them dead, and numerous cats leapt all around the patio and hid among the flowers, frightened by the authority in the voice. Then there was such a diaphanous silence that despite the disorder of the birds and the syllables of water on stone, one could hear the desolate breath of the sea.

But Fermina Daza was the one who made the decisions. She ordered what they would eat, what they would buy, what had to be done in every circumstance, and in that way she determined the life in a house where in reality nothing had to be determined. When she finished washing the cages and feeding the birds, and making certain that the flowers wanted for nothing, she was at a loss. Often, after she was expelled from school, she would fall asleep at siesta and not wake up until the next day. The painting classes were only a more amusing way to kill time.

He per-suaded her to let themselves be observed while they made love, to replace the conventional missionary position with the bicycle on the sea, or the chicken on the grill, or the drawn-and-quartered angel, and they almost broke their necks when the cords snapped as they were trying to devise something new in a hammock. The lessons were to no avail. The truth is that she was a fearless apprentice but lacked all talent for guided fornication. She never understood the charm of serenity in bed, never had a moment of invention, and her orgasms were inopportune and epidermic: an uninspired lay. For a long time Florentino Ariza lived with the deception that he was the only one, and she humored him in that belief until she had the bad luck to talk in her sleep. Little by little, listening to her sleep, he pieced together the navigation chart of her dreams and sailed among the countless islands of her secret life. In this way he learned that she did not want to marry him, but did feel joined to his life because of her immense gratitude to him for having corrupted her. She often said to him:

In any case, it was she who thrust Fermina Daza into life. In the afternoon, after the painting classes, she allowed herself to be taken out to see the city. Fermina Daza showed her the route she had taken every day with Aunt Escolástica, the bench in the little park where Florentino Ariza pretended to read while he waited for her, the narrow streets along which he followed her, the hiding places for their letters, the sinister palace where the prison of the Holy Office had been located, later restored and converted into the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, which she hated with all her soul. They climbed the hill of the paupers』 cemetery, where Florentino Ariza played the violin according to the direction of the winds so that she could listen to him in bed, and from there they viewed the entire historic city, the broken roofs and the decaying walls, the rubble of fortresses among the brambles, the trail of islands in the bay, the hovels of the poor around the swamps, the immense Caribbean.

Sister Franca de la Luz tucked the gold rosary into her sleeve. Then from the other she took a well-used handkerchief squeezed into a ball and held it tight in her fist, looking at Fermina Daza from a great distance and with a smile of commiseration.

She learned to smoke backward, with the lit end in her mouth, the way men smoked at night during the wars so that the glow of their cigarettes would not betray them. But she had never smoked alone. With Hildebranda in her house, she smoked every night before going to sleep, and it was then that she acquired the habit although she always hid it, even from her husband and her children, not only because it was thought improper for a woman to smoke in public but because she associated the pleasure with secrecy.

「Doctor--wait for me there.」

After the first two weeks of the cholera epidemic, the cemetery was overflowing and there was no room left in the churches despite the fact that they had dispatched the decayed remains of many nameless civic heroes to the communal ossuary. The air in the Cathedral grew thin with the vapors from badly sealed crypts, and its doors did not open again until three years later, at the time that Fermina Daza saw Florentino Ariza at close quarters as she left Midnight Mass. By the third week the cloister of the Convent of St. Clare was full all the way to its poplar-lined walks, and it was necessary to use the Community』s orchard, which was twice as large, as a cemetery. There graves were dug deep enough to bury the dead on three levels, without delay and without coffins, but this had to be stopped because the brimming ground turned into a sponge that oozed sickening, infected blood at every step. Then arrangements were made to continue burying in The Hand of God, a cattle ranch less than a league from the city, which was later consecrated as the Universal Cemetery.

When the curlew sang five o』clock along with the local roosters, Dr. Juvenal Urbino commended himself body and soul to Divine Providence because he did not have the heart to live another day in his rubble-strewn homeland. But in time the affection of his family, the Sundays in the country, and the covetous attentions of the unmarried women of his class mitigated the bitterness of his first impression. Little by little he grew accustomed to the sultry heat of October, to the excessive odors, to the hasty judgments of his friends, to the We』ll see tomorrow, Doctor, don』t worry, and at last he gave in to the spell of habit. It did not take him long to invent an easy justification for his surrender. This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

Sister Franca de la Luz, on the other hand, greeted her with a joy that seemed sincere. She was surprised at how much she had grown and matured, and she praised the good judgment with which she managed the house, the good taste evident in the patio, the brazier filled with orange blossoms. She ordered the novice to wait for her without getting too close to the crows, who in a careless moment might peck out her eyes, and she looked for a private spot where she could sit down and talk alone with Fermina, who invited her into the drawing room.

The water was crystalline and cool in the dark clay, and it tasted of the forest. But Dr. Juvenal Urbino was not taken in by these appearances of purity, for he knew that despite all precautions, the bottom of each earthen jar was a sanctuary for waterworms. He had spent the slow hours of his childhood watching them with an almost mystical astonish-ment, convinced along with so many other people at the time that waterworms were animes, supernatural creatures who, from the sedi-ment in still water, courted young maidens and could inflict furious vengeance because of love. As a boy he had seen the havoc they had wreaked in the house of Lázara Conde, a schoolteacher who dared to rebuff the animes, and he had seen the watery trail of glass in the street and the mountain of stones they had thrown at her windows for three days and three nights. And so it was a long while before he learned that waterworms were in reality the larvae of mosquitoes, but once he learned it he never forgot it, because from that moment on he realized that they and many other evil animes could pass through our simple stone filters intact.

It was not difficult to persuade them to give him return passage in exchange for the cabin he had surrendered to the representative of Queen Victoria. The Captain also attempted to dissuade him, arguing that the telegraph was the science of the future. So much so, he said, that they were already devising a system for installing it on boats. But he resisted all arguments, and in the end the Captain took him home, not because he owed him the price of the cabin but because he knew of his excellent connections to the River Company of the Caribbean.

「My poor child,」 she sighed, 「you are still thinking about that man.」

The moment was not long in coming. In less than a year his students at Misericordia Hospital asked for his help in treating a charity patient with a strange blue coloration all over his body. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had only to see him from the doorway to recognize the enemy. But they were in luck: the patient had arrived three days earlier on a schooner from Cura?ao and had come to the hospital clinic by himself, and it did not seem probable that he had infected anyone else. In any event, Dr. Juvenal Urbino alerted his colleagues and had the authorities warn the neighboring ports so that they could locate and quarantine the contaminated schooner, and he had to restrain the military commander of the city who wanted to declare martial law and initiate the therapeutic strategy of firing the cannon every quarter hour.

That was Florentino Ariza』s first bedroom love. But instead of their forming a permanent union, of the kind his mother dreamed about, both used it to embark on a profligate way of life. Florentino Ariza developed methods that seemed incredible in someone like him, taciturn and thin and dressed like an old man from another time. He had two advantages working in his favor, however. One was an unerring eye that promptly spotted the woman, even in a crowd, who was waiting for him, though even then he courted her with caution, for he felt that nothing was more embarrassing or more demeaning than a refusal. The other was that women promptly identified him as a solitary man in need of love, a street beggar as humble as a whipped dog, who made them yield without conditions, without asking him for anything, without hoping for anything from him except the tranquillity of knowing they had done him a favor. These were his only weapons, and with them he joined in historic battles of absolute secrecy, which he recorded with the rigor of a notary in a coded book, recognizable among many others by the title that said everything: Women. His first notation was the Widow Nazaret. Fifty years later, when Fermina Daza was freed from her sacramental sentence, he had some twenty-five notebooks, with six hundred twenty-two entries of long-term liaisons, apart from the countless fleeting adventures that did not even deserve a charitable note.

Fermina Daza felt the blood pounding through her veins, and then she dared.

「Your father is right when he says that you are a mule,」 she said.

「I won』t look,」 he said.

「Thank God,」 he said, and he misquoted St. Thomas: 「Remem-ber that everything that is good, whatever its origin, comes from the Holy Spirit. Do you like music?」

No one doubted that the sanitary rigor of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, more than the efficacy of his pronouncements, had made the miracle possible. From that time on, and well into this century, cholera was endemic not only in the city but along most of the Caribbean coast and the valley of the Magda-lena, but it never again flared into an epidemic. The crisis meant that Dr. Juvenal Urbino』s warnings were heard with greater serious-ness by public officials. They established an obligatory Chair of Cholera and Yellow Fever in the Medical School, and realized the urgency of closing up the sewers and building a market far from the garbage dump. By that time, however, Dr. Urbino was not con-cerned with proclaiming victory, nor was he moved to persevere in his social mission, for at that moment one of his wings was broken, he was distracted and in disarray and ready to forget everything else in life, because he had been struck by the lightning of his love for Fermina Daza.

She felt herself the victim of a grave injustice, but her reaction was not vindictive. On the contrary: she would have liked to discover who the author of the anonymous letter was in order to convince him of his error with all the pertinent explanations, for she felt certain that never, for any reason, would she respond to the wooing of Juvenal Urbino. In the days that followed she received two more unsigned letters, as perfidious as the first, but none of the three seemed to be written by the same person. Either she was the victim of a plot, or the false version of her secret love affair had gone further than anyone could imagine. She was disturbed by the idea that it was all the result of a simple indiscretion on the part of Juvenal Urbino.

It was during this time that a Belgian photographer came to the city and set up his studio at the end of the Arcade of the Scribes, and all those with the money to pay took advantage of the oppor-tunity to have their pictures taken. Fermina and Hildebranda were among the first. They emptied Fermina Sanchez』s clothes closet, they shared the finest dresses, the parasols, the party shoes, the hats, and they dressed as midcentury ladies. Gala Placidia helped them lace up the corsets, she showed them how to move inside the wire frames of the hoop skirts, how to wear the gloves, how to button the high-heeled boots. Hildebranda preferred a broad-brimmed hat with ostrich feathers that hung down over her shoulder. Fermina wore a more recent model decorated with painted plaster fruit and crinoline flowers. At last they giggled when they looked in the mirror and saw the resemblance to the daguerreotypes of their grandmothers, and they went off happy, laughing for all they were worth, to have the photograph of their lives taken. Gala Placidia watched from the balcony as they crossed the park with their parasols open, totter-ing on their high heels and pushing against the hoop skirts with their bodies as if they were children』s walkers, and she gave them her blessing so that God would help them in their portraits.

「It is the request of someone who deserves everything he desires and whose only wish is to make you happy,」 said the nun. 「Do you know who that is?」

She was married forever after at the main altar of the Cathedral, with a Mass at which three bishops officiated, at eleven o』clock in the morning on the day of the Holy Trinity, and with-out a single charitable thought for Florentino Ariza, who at that hour was delirious with fever, dying because of her, lying without shelter on a boat that was not to carry him to forgetting. During the ceremony, and later at the reception, she wore a smile that seemed painted on with white lead, a soulless grimace that some interpreted as a mocking smile of victory, but in reality was her poor attempt at disguising the terror of a virgin bride.

He spoke to her of Paris, of love in Paris, of the lovers in Paris who kissed on the street, on the omnibus, on the flowering ter-races of the cafés opened to the burning winds and languid accordions of summer, who made love standing up on the quays of the Seine without anyone disturbing them. As he spoke in the darkness he caressed the curve of her neck with his fingertips, he caressed the fine silky hair on her arms, her evasive belly, and when he felt that her tension had given way he made his first attempt to raise her nightgown, but she stopped him with an impulse typical of her character. She said: 「I know how to do it myself.」 She took it off, in fact, and then she was so still that Dr. Urbino might have thought she was no longer there if it had not been for the glint of her body in the darkness.

Three days later, in Paris, Dr. Juvenal Urbino received a telegram during supper with friends, and he toasted the memory of his father with champagne. He said: 「He was a good man.」 Later he would reproach himself for his lack of maturity: he had avoided reality in order not to cry. But three weeks later he received a copy of the posthumous letter, and then he surrendered to the truth. All at once the image of the man he had known before he knew any other was revealed to him in all its profundity, the man who had raised him and taught him and had slept and fornicated with his mother for thirty-two years and yet who, before that letter, had never revealed himself body and soul because of timidity, pure and simple.

「Now go and forget all about it,」 she said. 「This never happened.」

Florentino Ariza passed the time watching black men unload the boat onto their backs, he watched them carry off crates of china, and pianos for the spinsters of Envigado, and he did not realize until it was too late that Rosalba and her party were among the passengers who had stayed on shore. He saw them when they were already sitting sidesaddle, with their Amazons』 boots and their parasols in equatorial colors, and then he took the step he had not dared to take during, the preceding days: he waved goodbye to Rosalba, and the three women responded in kind, with a familiarity that cut him to the quick be-cause his boldness came too late. He saw them round the corner of the store, followed by the mules carrying their trunks, their hatboxes, and the baby』s cage, and soon afterward he saw them ascend along the edge of the precipice like a line of ants and disappear from his life. Then he felt alone in the world, and the memory of Fermina Daza, lying in ambush in recent days, dealt him a mortal blow.

「Please get in,」 said Dr. Juvenal Urbino. 「I will take you wherever you want to go.」

And then, for the rest of the day, everyone knocked at the door: beggars, girls with lottery tickets, the Sisters of Charity, the knife grinder with the gossip, the man who bought bottles, the man who bought old gold, the man who bought newspapers, the fake gypsies who offered to read one』s destiny in cards, in the lines of one』s palm, in coffee grounds, in the water in washbasins. Gala Placidia spent the week opening and closing the street door to say no, another day, or shouting from the balcony in a foul humor to stop bothering us, damn it, we already bought everything we need. She had replaced Aunt Escolástica with so much fervor and so much grace that Fermina confused them to the point of loving her. She had the obsessions of a slave. Whenever she had free time she would go to the work-room to iron the linens; she kept them perfect, she kept them in cupboards with lavender, and she ironed and folded not only what she had just washed but also what might have lost its brightness through disuse. With the same care she continued to maintain the wardrobe of Fermina Sánchez, Fermina』s mother, who had died fourteen years before.

So that her wedding, one of the most spectacular of the final years of the last century, was for her the prelude to horror. The anguish of the honeymoon affected her much more than the social uproar caused by her marriage to the most incomparably elegant young man of the day. When the banns were announced at High Mass in the Cathedral, Fermina Daza received anonymous letters again, some of them con-taining death threats, but she took scant notice of them because all the fear of which she was capable was centered on her imminent violation. Although that was not her intention, it was the correct way to respond to anonymous letters from a class accustomed by the affronts of his-tory to bow before faits accomplis. So that little by little they swal-lowed their opposition as it became clear that the marriage was irrevocable. She noticed the gradual changes in the attention paid her by livid women, degraded by arthritis and resentment, who one day were convinced of the uselessness of their intrigues and appeared unannounced in the little Park of the Evangels as if it were their own home, bearing recipes and engagement gifts.

「I told your daughter that she is like a rose.」

From the time the cholera proclamation was issued, the local garrison shot a cannon from the fortress every quarter hour, day and night, in accordance with the local superstition that gunpowder purified the atmosphere. The cholera was much more devastating to the black population, which was larger and poorer, but in reality it had no regard for color or background. It ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the extent of its ravages was never known, not be-cause this was impossible to establish but because one of our most widespread virtｈttpｓ://ｒｅａd.９９cｓw•ｃｏmues was a certain reticence concerning personal misfortune.

They never received a reply. One day, when Juvenal Urbino happened to be passing the Luxembourg Gar-dens, he saw him come out of the Senate with a young woman on his arm. He seemed very old, he walked with difficulty, his beard and hair were less brilliant than in his pictures, and he wore an overcoat that seemed to belong to a larger man. He did not want to ruin the memory with an impertinent greeting: he was satisfied with the almost unreal vision that he would keep for the rest of his life. When he returned to Paris as a married man, in a position to see him under more formal circumstances, Victor Hugo had already died.

「For any woman with a shred of sense, that man is a gift from Divine Providence,」 said the nun.

Fermina Daza chewed on the impertinence as she looked at the nun without blinking, looked her straight in the eye without speak-ing, chewing in silence, until she saw with infinite satisfaction that those masculine eyes had filled with tears. Sister Franca de la Luz dried them with the ball of the handkerchief and stood up.

Although she had never seen him before, she recognized him immediately. The previous month, Fermina Daza had spoken about him, in an offhand way and with no sign of interest, one afternoon when she did not want to pass by the house of the Marquis de Casalduero because the landau with the golden horses was stopped in front of the door. She told her who the owner was and attempted to explain the reasons for her antipathy, although she did not say a word about his courting her. Hildebranda thought no more about him. But when she identified him as a vision out of legend, standing in the carriage door with one foot on the ground and the other on the footboard, she could not understand her cousin』s motives.

Fermina Daza began a gesture of refusal, but Hildebranda had already accepted. Dr. Juvenal Urbino jumped down, and with his fingertips, almost without touching her, he helped her into the carriage. Fermina had no alternative but to climb in after her, her face blazing with embarrassment.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not sleep at all on the night of his return; he was frightened by the darkness and the silence, and he said three rosaries to the Holy Spirit and all the prayers he could remember to ward off calamities and shipwrecks and all manner of night terrors, while a curlew that had come in through a half-closed door sang every hour on the hour in his bedroom. He was tormented by the hallucinating screams of the madwomen in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum next door, the harsh dripping from the water jar into the washbasin which resonated throughout the house, the long-legged steps of the curlew wandering in his bedroom, his congenital fear of the dark, and the invisible presence of his dead father in the vast, sleeping mansion.

But in any case, it was a Saturday of passion, which culminated in a new crisis of fever when he thought the moment had come for the newlyweds to flee in secret through a false door to give themselves over to the delights of their first night. Someone saw him shivering with fever and informed the Captain, who, fearing a case of cholera, left the party with the ship』s doctor, and the doctor took the precau-tion of sending Florentino to the quarantine cabin with a dose of bromides. The next day, however, when they sighted the cliffs of Caracolí, his fever had disappeared and his spirits were elated, be-cause in the marasmus of the sedatives he had resolved once and for all that he did not give a damn about the brilliant future of the telegraph and that he would take this very same boat back to his old Street of Windows.

Florentino Ariza was never very conscious of that curative jour-ney. He would remember it always, as he remembered everything that happened during that period, through the rarefied lenses of his misfortune. When he received the telegram informing him of his appointment, it did not even occur to him to consider it, but Lotario Thugut convinced him with Germanic arguments that a brilliant career awaited him in public administration. He told him: 「The telegraph is the profession of the future.」 He gave him a pair of gloves lined with rabbit fur, a hat worthy of the steppes, and an overcoat with a plush collar, tried and proven in the icy winters of Bavaria.

「What do you expect, Doctor? This is the first time I have slept with a stranger.」

「What a whore you are!」 she said.

His obsession was the dangerous lack of sanitation in the city. He appealed to the highest authorities to fill in the Spanish sewers that were an immense breeding ground for rats, and to build in their place a closed sewage system whose contents would not empty into the cove at the market, as had always been the case, but into some distant drainage area instead. The well-equipped colonial houses had latrines with septic tanks, but two thirds of the population lived in shanties at the edge of the swamps and relieved themselves in the open air. The excrement dried in the sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas in the cool, gentle breezes of December. Dr. Juvenal Urbino attempted to force the City Council to impose an obligatory training course so that the poor could learn how to build their own latrines. He fought in vain to stop them from tossing garbage into the mangrove thickets that over the centuries had become swamps of putrefaction, and to have them collect it instead at least twice a week and incinerate it in some uninhabited area.

Then she understood. She asked herself with what authority a woman who had made her life miserable because of an innocent letter served as the emissary of love, but she did not dare to speak of it. Instead she said yes, she knew that man, and by the same token she also knew that he had no right to interfere in her life.

「Now I realize,」 she said, 「that what bothered me was not my shoes but this wire cage.」

The truth was that Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not drink coffee, except for a cup first thing in the morning. He did not drink alcohol either, except for a glass of wine with meals on solemn occasions, but he not only drank down the coffee that Lorenzo Daza offered him, he also accepted a glass of anisette. Then he accepted another coffee with another anisette, and then another and another, even though he still had to make a few more calls. At first he listened with attention to the excuses that Lorenzo Daza continued to offer in the name of his daughter, whom he defined as an intelligent and serious girl, worthy of a prince whether he came from here or anywhere else, whose only defect, so he said, was her mulish character. But after the second anisette, the Doctor thought he heard Fermina Daza』s voice at the other end of the patio, and his imagination went after her, followed her through the night that had just descended in the house as she lit the lights in the corridor, fumigated the bedrooms with the insecticide bomb, uncovered the pot of soup on the stove, which she was going to share that night with her father, the two of them alone at the table, she not raising her eyes, not tasting the soup, not breaking the rancorous spell, until he was forced to give in and ask her to forgive his severity that afternoon.

The trip downriver took less than six days, and Florentino Ariza felt that he was home again from the moment they entered Mercedes Lagoon at dawn and he saw the trail of lights on the fishing canoes undulating in the wake of the boat. It was still dark when they docked in Ni?o Perdido Cove, nine leagues from the bay and the last port for riverboats until the old Spanish channel was dredged and put back into service. The passengers would have to wait until six o』clock in the morning to board the fleet of sloops for hire that would carry them to their final destination. But Florentino Ariza was so eager that he sailed much earlier on the mail sloop, whose crew acknowl-edged him as one of their own. Before he left the boat he succumbed to the temptation of a symbolic act: he threw his petate into the water, and followed it with his eyes as it floated past the beacon lights of the invisible fishermen, left the lagoon, and disappeared in the ocean. He was sure he would not need it again for all the rest of his days. Never again, because never again would he abandon the city of Fermina Daza.

One night during the war, when he was drifting, not knowing what direction his life should take, the celebrated Widow Nazaret took refuge in his house because hers had been destroyed by cannon fire during the siege by the rebel general Ricardo Gaitán Obeso. It was Tránsito Ariza who took control of the situation and sent the widow to her son』s bedroom on the pretext that there was no space in hers, but actually in the hope that another love would cure him of the one that did not allow him to live. Florentino Ariza had not made love since he lost his virginity to Rosalba in the cabin on the boat, and in this emergency it seemed natural to him that the widow should sleep in the bed and he in the hammock. But she had already made the decision for him. She sat on the edge of the bed where Florentino Ariza was lying, not knowing what to do, and she began to speak to him of her inconsolable grief for the husband who had died three years earlier, and in the meantime she removed her widow』s weeds and tossed them in the air until she was not even wearing her wedding ring.

「All he asks is that you allow him to speak with you for five minutes,」 said the nun. 「I am certain your father will agree.」

On Christmas Eve they went to Midnight Mass in the Cathedral. Fermina sat where she used to hear Florentino Ariza』s confidential music with greatest clarity, and she showed her cousin the exact spot where, on a night like this, she had seen his frightened eyes up close for the first time. They ventured alone as far as the Arcade of the Scribes, they bought sweets, they were amused in the shop that sold fancy paper, and Fermina Daza showed her cousin the place where she suddenly discovered that her love was nothing more than an illusion. She herself had not realized that every step she took from her house to school, every spot in the city, every moment of her recent past, did not seem to exist except by the grace of Florentino Ariza. Hildebranda pointed this out to her, but she did not admit it because she never would have admitted that Florentino Ariza, for better or for worse, was the only thing that had ever happened to her in her life.

She would not have recognized him, for there was nothing about him that corresponded to the image she had formed from Fermina Daza. At first glance it seemed impossible that her cousin could have been on the verge of madness because of that almost invisible clerk with his air of a whipped dog, whose clothing, worthy of a rabbi in disgrace, and whose solemn manner could not perturb anyone』s heart. But she soon repented of her first impression, for Florentino Ariza placed himself at her unconditional service without knowing who she was: he never found out. No one could have understood her as he did, so that he did not ask for identification or even for her address. His solution was very simple: she would pass by the telegraph office on Wednesday afternoons so that he could place her lover』s answers in her hand, and nothing more. And yet when he read the written message that Hildebranda brought him, he asked if she would accept a suggestion, and she agreed. Florentino Ariza first made some cor-rections between the lines, erased them, rewrote them, had no more room, and at last tore up the page and wrote a completely new message that she thought very touching. When she left the telegraph office, Hildebranda was on the verge of tears.

At dawn, when they fell asleep, she was still a virgin, but she would not be one much longer. The following night, in fact, after he taught her how to dance Viennese waltzes under the starry Caribbean sky, he went to the bathroom after she did, and when he returned to the stateroom he found her waiting for him naked in the bed. Then it was she who took the initiative, and gave herself without fear, with-out regret, with the joy of an adventure on the high seas, and with no traces of bloody ceremony except for the rose of honor on the sheet. They both made love well, almost as if by miracle, and they continued to make love well, night and day and better each time for the rest of the voyage, and when they reached La Rochelle they got along as if they were old lovers.

She was twenty-eight years old and had given birth three times, but her naked body preserved intact the giddy excitement of an un-married woman. Florentino Ariza was never to understand how a few articles of penitential clothing could have hidden the drives of that wild mare who, choking on her own feverish desire, undressed him as she had never been able to undress her husband, who would have thought her perverse, and tried, with the confusion and innocence of five years of conjugal fidelity, to satisfy in a single assault the iron abstinence of her mourning. Before that night, and from the hour of grace when her mother gave birth to her, she had never even been in the same bed with any man other than her dead husband.

「I am happy,」 she said, 「because only now do I know for certain where he is when he is not at home.」

When she awoke she opened the letter. It was brief and proper, and all that Juvenal Urbino asked was permission to request her father』s permission to visit her. She was impressed by its simplicity and seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many days faded away on the spot. She kept the letter in the bottom of her trunk, but she remembered that she had also kept Florentino Ariza』s perfumed letters there, and she took it out of the chest to find another place for it, shaken by a rush of shame. Then it seemed that the most decent thing to do was to pretend she had not received it, and she burned it in the lamp, watching how the drops of wax exploded into blue bubbles above the flame. She sighed: 「Poor man.」 And then she realized that it was the second time she had said those words in little more than a year, and for a moment she thought about Florentino Ariza, and even she was surprised at how removed he was from her life: poor man.

「It was not me,」 he said. 「It was the anisette.」

They almost had, however. The epidemic of cholera morbus, whose first victims were struck down in the standing water of the market, had, in eleven weeks, been responsible for the greatest death toll in our history. Until that time the eminent dead were interred under the flagstones in the churches, in the exclusive vicinity of archbishops and capitulars, while the less wealthy were buried in the patios of convents. The poor were sent to the colonial cemetery, located on a windy hill that was separated from the city by a dry canal whose mortar bridge bore the legend carved there by order of some clairvoyant mayor: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch』entrate.

There was a mob in front of the Belgian』s studio because photo-graphs were being taken of Beny Centeno, who had won the boxing championship in Panama. He wore his boxing trunks and his boxing gloves and his crown, and it was not easy to photograph him because he had to hold a fighting stance for a whole minute and breathe as little as possible, but as soon as he put up his guard, his fans burst into cheers and he could not resist the temptation to please them by showing off his skill. When it was the cousins』 turn, the sky had clouded over and rain seemed imminent, but they allowed their faces to be powdered with starch and they leaned against an ala-baster column with such ease that they remained motionless for more time than seemed reasonable. It was an immortal portrait. When Hildebranda died on her ranch at Flores de María, when she was almost one hundred years old, they found her copy locked in the bedroom closet, hidden among the folds of the perfumed sheets along with the fossil of a thought in a letter that had faded with time. For many years Fermina Daza kept hers on the first page of a family album, then it disappeared without anyone』s knowing how, or when, and came into the possession of Florentino Ariza, through a series of unbelievable coincidences, when they were both over sixty years old.

She continued to speak of his virtues, of his devotion, of his dedication to serving those in pain. As she spoke she pulled from her sleeve a gold rosary with Christ carved in marble, and dangled it in front of Fermina Daza』s eyes. It was a family heirloom, more than a hundred years old, carved by a goldsmith from Siena and blessed by Clement IV.

What most struck Hildebranda was her cousin』s solitude. She seemed, she told her, an old maid of twenty. Accustomed to large scattered families in houses where no one was certain how many people were living or eating at any given time, Hildebranda could not imagine a girl her age reduced to the cloister of a private life. That was true: from the time she awoke at six in the morning until she turned out the light in the bedroom, Fermina Daza devoted herself to killing time. Life was imposed on her from outside. First, at the final rooster crow, the milkman woke her with his rapping on the door knocker. Then came the knock of the fishwife with her box of red snappers dying on a bed of algae, the sumptuous fruit sellers with vegetables from María la Baja and fruit from San Jacinto.

The strangest thing, however, had not yet occurred. Taking advantage of the visit of the famous pianist Romeo Lussich, who played a cycle of Mozart sonatas as soon as the city had recovered from mourning the death of General Ignacio María, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had the piano from the Music School placed in a mule-drawn wagon and brought a history-making serenade to Fermina Daza. She was awakened by the first measures, and she did not have to look out the grating on the balcony to know who was the sponsor of that uncommon tribute. The only thing she regretted was not having the courage of other harassed maidens, who emptied their chamber pots on the heads of unwanted suitors. Lorenzo Daza, on the other hand, dressed without delay as the serenade was playing, and when it was over he had Dr. Juvenal Urbino and the pianist, still wearing their formal concert clothes, come in to the visitors』 parlor, where he thanked them for the serenade with a glass of good brandy.

The boat, one of three identical vessels belonging to the River Company of the Caribbean, had been renamed in honor of the founder: Pius V Loayza. It was a floating two-story wooden house on a wide, level iron hull, and its maximum draft of five feet allowed it to negotiate the variable depths of the river. The older boats had been built in Cincinnati in midcentury on the legendary model of the vessels that traveled the Ohio and the Mississippi, with a wheel on each side powered by a wood-fed boiler. Like them, the boats of the River Company of the Caribbean had a lower deck almost level with the water, with the steam engines and the galleys and the sleeping quar-ters like henhouses where the crew hung their hammocks criss-crossed at different heights.

「Let him come,」 said Fermina Daza.

「I give you my most heartfelt apologies, sir,」 she said.

At first he did not regret it, for the river was high at that time of year and the boat navigated without any difficulty for the first two nights. After dinner, at five o』clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tables in the dining room, wrapped in the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip. Florentino Ariza was awake most of the night, thinking that he heard the voice of Fermina Daza in the fresh river breeze, ministering to his solitude with her memory, hear-ing her sing in the respiration of the boat as it moved like a great animal through the darkness, until the first rosy streaks appeared on the horizon and the new day suddenly broke over deserted pastureland and misty swamps. Then his journey seemed yet another proof of his mother』s wisdom, and he felt that he had the fortitude to endure forgetting.

He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her be-cause he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.

He really thought it was, and she was going to know very soon, and for the rest of her life, that the topic of music was almost a magic formula that he used to propose friendship, but at that moment she interpreted it as a joke. Besides, her two friends, who had pre-tended to paint while she and Dr. Juvenal Urbino were talking at the window, tittered and hid their faces behind their palettes, and this made Fermina Daza lose her self-control. Blind with fury, she slammed the window shut. The Doctor stared at the sheer lace curtains in bewilderment, he tried to find the street door but lost his way, and in his confusion he knocked into the cage with the perfumed crows. They broke into sordid shrieking, flapped their wings in fright, and saturated the Doctor』s clothing with a feminine fragrance. The thundering voice of Lorenzo Daza rooted him to the spot:

On the morning of his return from his inconclusive journey, he learned that Fermina Daza was spending her honeymoon in Europe, and his agitated heart took it for granted that she would live there, if not forever then for many years to come. This certainty filled him with his first hope of forgetting. He thought of Rosalba, whose memory burned brighter as the other』s dimmed. It was during this time that he grew the mustache with the waxed tips that he would keep for the rest of his life and that changed his entire being, and the idea of substituting one love for another carried him along surpris-ing paths. Little by little the fragrance of Fermina Daza became less frequent and less intense, and at last it remained only in white gardenias.

The patient died in four days, choked by a grainy white vomit, but in the following weeks no other case was discovered despite constant vigilance. A short while later, The Commercial Daily pub-lished the news that two children had died of cholera in different locations in the city. It was learned that one of them had had common dysentery, but the other, a girl of five, appeared to have been, in fact, a victim of cholera. Her parents and three brothers were sepa-rated and placed under individual quarantine, and the entire neighbor-hood was subjected to strict medical supervision. One of the children contracted cholera but recovered very soon, and the entire family returned home when the danger was over. Eleven more cases were reported in the next three months, and in the fifth there was an alarming outbreak, but by the end of the year it was believed that the danger of an epidemic had been averted.

「You can look now,」 sa九*九*藏*書id Hildebranda.

The assault had been so rapid and so triumphant that it could only be understood not as a sudden madness caused by boredom but as the fruit of a plan elaborated over time and down to its smallest detail. This gratifying certainty increased Florentino Ariza』s eagerness, for at the height of pleasure he had experienced a revelation that he could not believe, that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion. And so it was that he felt compelled to discover the identity of the mistress of violation in whose panther』s instincts he might find the cure for his misfortune. But he was not successful. On the contrary, the more he delved into the search the further he felt from the truth.

It occurred to her that perhaps he was different from his worthy appearance, that perhaps he talked too much when he was making house calls and boasted of imaginary conquests, as did so many other men of his class. She thought about writing him a letter to reproach him for the insult to her honor, but then she decided against the idea because that might be just what he wanted. She tried to learn more from the friends who painted with her in the sewing room, but they had heard only benign comments concerning the serenade by solo piano. She felt furious, impotent, humiliated. In contrast to her initial feeling that she wanted to meet with her invisible enemy in order to convince him of his errors, now she only wanted to cut him to ribbons with the pruning shears. She spent sleepless nights analyzing details and phrases in the anonymous letters in the hope of finding some shred of comfort. It was a vain hope: Fermina Daza was, by nature, alien to the inner world of the Urbino de la Calle family, and she had weapons for defending herself from their good actions but not from their evil ones.

For a long time the water in the cisterns had been honored as the cause of the scrotal hernia that so many men in the city endured not only without embarrassment but with a certain patriotic insolence. When Juvenal Urbino was in elementary school, he could not avoid a spasm of horror at the sight of men with ruptures sitting in their doorways on hot afternoons, fanning their enormous testicle as if it were a child sleeping between their legs. It was said that the hernia whistled like a lugubrious bird on stormy nights and twisted in unbearable pain when a buzzard feather was burned nearby, but no one complained about those discomforts because a large, well-carried rupture was, more than anything else, a display of masculine honor. When Dr. Juvenal Urbino returned from Europe he was already well aware of the scientific fallacy in these beliefs, but they were so rooted in local superstition that many people opposed the mineral enrichment of the water in the cisterns for fear of destroying its ability to cause an honorable rupture.

At midnight he put on his Sunday suit and went to stand alone under Fermina Daza』s balcony to play the love waltz he had composed for her, which was known only to the two of them and which for three years had been the emblem of their frustrated com-plicity. He played, murmuring the words, his violin bathed in tears, with an inspiration so intense that with the first measures the dogs on the street and then the dogs all over the city began to howl, but then, little by little, they were quieted by the spell of the music, and the waltz ended in supernatural silence. The balcony did not open, and no one appeared on the street, not even the night watchman, who almost always came running with his oil lamp in an effort to profit in some small way from serenades. The act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for when he put the violin back into its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving the next morning but that he had gone away many years before with the irrevocable determination never to return.

「Let』s not go on with the medical lesson,」 she said.

Fermina Daza soon realized that her father was trying to soften her heart. The day after the serenade, he said to her in a casual manner: 「Imagine how your mother would feel if she knew you were being courted by an Urbino de la Calle.」 Her dry response was: 「She would turn over in her grave.」 The friends who painted with her told her that Lorenzo Daza had been invited to lunch at the Social Club by Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who had received a severe reprimand for breaking club rules.

She took off the taffeta blouse with the beaded embroidery and threw it across the room onto the easy chair in the corner, she tossed her bodice over her shoulder to the other side of the bed, with one pull she removed her long ruffled skirt, her satin garter belt and funereal stockings, and she threw everything on the floor until the room was carpeted with the last remnants of her mourning. She did it with so much joy, and with such well-measured pauses, that each of her gestures seemed to be saluted by the cannon of the attacking troops, which shook the city down to its foundations. Florentino Ariza tried to help her unfasten her stays, but she anticipated him with a deft maneuver, for in five years of matrimonial devotion she learned to depend on herself in all phases of love, even the preliminary stages, with no help from anyone. Then she removed her lace panties, sliding them down her legs with the rapid movements of a swimmer, and at last she was naked.

He did not sleep again, and if at times he sat down to pick at food, it was in the hope that Fermina Daza would be at the table or, conversely, to deny her the homage of fasting for her sake. At times his solace was the certainty that during the intoxication of her wedding celebration, even during the feverish nights of her honeymoon, Fermina Daza would suffer one moment, one at least but one in any event, when the phantom of the sweet-heart she had scorned, humiliated, and insulted would appear in her thoughts, and all her happiness would be destroyed.

The night before they reached the port of Caracolí, which was the end of the journey, the Captain gave the traditional farewell party, with a woodwind orchestra composed of crew members, and fireworks from the bridge. The minister from Great Britain had sur-vived the odyssey with exemplary stoicism, shooting with his camera the animals they would not allow him to kill with his rifles, and not a night went by that he was not seen in evening dress in the din-ing room. But he came to the final party wearing the tartans of the MacTavish clan, and he played the bagpipe for everyone』s entertain-ment and taught those who were interested how to dance his national dances, and before daybreak he almost had to be carried to his cabin. Florentino Ariza, prostrate with grief, had gone to the farthest corner of the deck where the noise of the revelry could not reach him, and he put on Lotario Thugut』s overcoat in an effort to overcome the shiv-ering in his bones. He had awakened at five that morning, as the con-demned man awakens at dawn on the day of his execution, and for that entire day he had done nothing but imagine, minute by minute, each of the events at Fermina Daza』s wedding. Later, when he returned home, he realized that he had made a mistake in the time and that everything had been different from what he had imagined, and he even had the good sense to laugh at his fantasy.

Until then Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family had conceived of death as a misfor-tune that befell others, other people』s fathers and mothers, other people』s brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs. They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion. His father』s posthumous letter, more than the telegram with the bad news, hurled him headlong against the certainty of death. And yet one of his oldest memories, when he was nine years old perhaps, perhaps when he was eleven, was in a way an early sign of death in the person of his father.

The Doctor tried to intervene and stop him, but Lorenzo Daza paid no attention to him. He insisted: 「Hurry up.」 She looked at her friends with a secret plea for understanding, and she said to her father that she had nothing to beg pardon for, she had only closed the window to keep out the sun. Dr. Urbino, with good humor, tried to confirm her words, but Lorenzo Daza insisted that he be obeyed. Then Fermina Daza, pale with rage, turned toward the window, and extending her right foot as she raised her skirt with her fingertips, she made a theatrical curtsy to the Doctor.

Hildebranda』s trip had also been imposed by her parents in an effort to put distance between her and her impossible love, although they wanted her to think that it was to help Fermina decide on a good match. Hildebranda had accepted, hoping to mock forgetfulness as her cousin had done before her, and she had arranged with the telegraph operator in Fonseca to send her messages with the greatest prudence. And that is why her disillusion was so bitter when she learned that Fermina Daza had rejected Florentino Ariza. Moreover, Hildebranda had a universal conception of love, and she believed that whatever happened to one love affected all other loves throughout the world. Still, she did not renounce her plan. With an audacity that caused a crisis of dismay in Fermina Daza, she went to the telegraph office alone, intending to win the favor of Florentino Ariza.

「I remember it very well,」 she said, 「and I』m still angry.」 Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm. She never knew how her hand came to his chest and felt something it could not decipher. He said: 「It is a scapular.」 She caressed the hairs on his chest one by one and then seized all the hair in her fist to pull it out by the roots. 「Harder,」 he said. She tried, until she knew she was not hurting him, and then it was her hand that sought his, lost in the darkness. But he did not allow their fingers to intertwine; instead he grasped her by the wrist and moved her hand along his body with an invisible but well-directed strength until she felt the ardent breath of a naked animal without bodily form, but eager and erect.

Fermina Daza, always resistant to the demands of fashion, brought back six trunks of clothing from different periods, for the great labels did not convince her. She had been in the Tuileries in the middle of winter for the launching of the collection by Worth, the indisputable tyrant of haute couture, and the only thing she got was a case of bron-chitis that kept her in bed for five days. Laferrière seemed less pre-tentious and voracious to her, but her wise decision was to buy her fill of what she liked best in the secondhand shops, although her hus-band swore in dismay that it was corpses』 clothing. In the same way she brought back quantities of Italian shoes without brand names, which she preferred to the renowned and famous shoes by Ferry, and she brought back a parasol from Dupuy, as red as the fires of hell, which gave our alarmed social chroniclers much to write about.

AT THE AGE of twenty-eight, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been the most desirable of bachelors. He had returned from a long stay in Paris, where he had completed advanced studies in medicine and surgery, and from the time he set foot on solid ground he gave over-whelming indications that he had not wasted a minute of his time. He returned more fastidious than when he left, more in control of his nature, and none of his contemporaries seemed as rigorous and as learned as he in his science, and none could dance better to the music of the day or improvise as well on the piano. Seduced by his personal charms and by the certainty of his family fortune, the girls in his circle held secret lotteries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled, too, on being with them, but he managed to keep himself in a state of grace, intact and tempting, until he succumbed without resistance to the plebeian charms of Fermina Daza.

The assault had taken place in the last cabin, but this communi-cated with the one next to it by a door, so that the two rooms had been converted into family sleeping quarters with four bunks. The occupants were two young women, another who was rather mature but very attractive, and an infant a few months old. They had boarded in Barranco de Loba, the port where cargo and passengers from Mompox were picked up ever since that city had been excluded from the itineraries of the steamboats because of the river』s caprices, and Florentino Ariza had noticed them only because they carried the sleeping child in a large birdcage.

Said in another way, she was right. Florentino Ariza had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginity or the abstinence of widowhood. He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love. And something else that from that time on would be her reason for living: he convinced her that one comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays, and whoever does not use them for whatever reason, one』s own or someone else』s, willingly or unwillingly, loses them forever. It was to her credit that she took him at his word. Still, because he thought he knew her better than anyone else, Floren-tino Ariza could not understand why a woman of such puerile re-sources should be so popular--a woman, moreover, who never stopped talking in bed about the grief she felt for her dead husband. The only explanation he could think of, one that could not be denied, was that the Widow Nazaret had enough tenderness to make up for what she lacked in the marital arts. They began to see each other with less frequency as she widened her horizons and he exploited his, trying to find solace in other hearts for his pain, and at last, with no sorrow, they forgot each other.

He had never spoken to her about the nature or condition of his business, and he had never taken her to his offices in the port, which were in a location forbidden to decent young ladies even if accompanied by their fathers. Lorenzo Daza did not come home before ten o』clock at night, which was the curfew hour during the less critical periods of the wars. Until that time he would stay at the Parish Café, playing one game or another, for he was an expert in all salon games and a good teacher as well. He always came home sober, not disturbing his daughter, despite the fact that he had his first anisette when he awoke and continued chewing the end of his unlit cigar and drinking at regular intervals throughout the day. One night, however, Fermina heard him come in. She heard his cossack』s step on the stair, his heavy breathing in the second-floor hallway, his pounding with the flat of his hand on her bedroom door. She opened it, and for the first time she was frightened by his twisted eye and the slurring of his words.

Lorenzo Daza accompanied him to his carriage, trying to force him to accept a gold peso for the second visit, but he would not take it. He gave the correct instructions to the driver for taking him to the houses of the two patients he still had to see, and he climbed into the carriage without help. But he began to feel sick as they bounced along the cobbled streets, so that he ordered the driver to take a different route. He looked at himself for a moment in the carriage mirror and saw that his image, too, was still thinking about Fermina Daza. He shrugged his shoulders. Then he belched, lowered his head to his chest, and fell asleep, and in his dream he began to hear funeral bells. First he heard those of the Cathedral and then he heard those of all the other churches, one after another, even the cracked pots of St. Julian the Hospitaler.

That was always the case: any event, good or bad, had some rela-tionship to her. At night, when the boat was anchored and most of the passengers walked the decks in despair, he perused the illustrated novels he knew almost by heart under the carbide lamp in the dining room, which was the only one kept burning until dawn, and the dramas he had read so often regained their original magic when he replaced the imaginary protagonists with people he knew in real life, reserving for himself and Fermina Daza the roles of star-crossed lovers. On other nights he wrote anguished letters and then scattered their fragments over the water that flowed toward her without pause. And so the most difficult hours passed for him, at times in the person of a timid prince or a paladin of love, at other times in his own scalded hide of a lover in the middle of forgetting, until the first breezes began to blow and he went to doze in the lounge chairs by the railing.

「How noble this city must be,」 he would say, 「for we have spent four hundred years trying to finish it off and we still have not succeeded,」

He was aware of the mortal threat of the drinking water. The mere idea of building an aqueduct seemed fantastic, since those who might have supported it had underground cisterns at their disposal, where water rained down over the years was collected under a thick layer of scum. Among the most valued household articles of the time were carved wooden water collectors whose stone filters dripped day and night into large earthen water jars. To prevent anyone from drinking from the aluminum cup used to dip out the water, its edges were as jagged as the crown of a mock king.

It was impossible to know if it was Europe or love that changed them, for both occurred at the same time. They were, in essence, not only between themselves but with everyone else, just as Florentino Ariza perceived them when he saw them leaving Mass two weeks after their return on that Sunday of his misfortune. They came back with a new conception of life, bringing with them the latest trends in the world and ready to lead, he with the most recent developments in literature, music, and above all in his science. He had a subscription to Le Figaro, so he would not lose touch with reality, and another to the Revue des Deux Mondes, so that he would not lose touch with poetry. He had also arranged with his bookseller in Paris to receive works by the most widely read authors, among them Anatole France and Pierre Loti, and by those he liked best, including Rémy de Gourmont and Paul Bourget, but under no circumstances anything by Emile Zola, whom he found intolerable despite his valiant intervention in the Dreyfus affair. The same bookseller agreed to mail him the most attractive scores from the Ricordi catalogue, chamber music above all, so that he could maintain the well-deserved title earned by his father as the greatest friend of concerts in the city.

Contrary to what he had imagined, even contrary to what she herself had imagined, she did not withdraw her hand or let it lie inert where he placed it, but instead she commended herself body and soul to the Blessed Virgin, clenched her teeth for fear she would laugh out loud at her own madness, and began to identify her rearing adversary by touch, discovering its size, the strength of its shaft, the extension of its wings, amazed by its determination but pitying its solitude, making it her own with a detailed curiosity that someone less experienced than her husband might have confused with caresses. He summoned all his reserves of strength to overcome the vertigo of her implacable scrutiny, until she released it with childish unconcern as if she were tossing it into the trash.

He tried to impose the latest ideas at Misericordia Hospital, but this was not as easy as it had seemed in his youthful enthusiasm, for the antiquated house of health was stubborn in its attachment to atavistic superstitions, such as standing beds in pots of water to prevent disease from climbing up the legs, or requiring evening wear and chamois gloves in the operating room because it was taken for granted that elegance was an essential condition for asepsis. They could not tolerate the young newcomer』s tasting a patient』s urine to determine the presence of sugar, quoting Charcot and Trousseau as if they were his roommates, issuing severe warnings in class against the mortal risks of vaccines while maintaining a suspicious faith in the recent invention of suppositories. He was in conflict with every-thing: his renovating spirit, his maniacal sense of civic duty, his slow humor in a land of immortal pranksters--everything, in fact, that constituted his most estimable virtues provoked the resentment of his older colleagues and the sly jokes of the younger ones.

Not on the first night on rough seas, or on the following nights of smooth sailing, or ever in her very long married life did the barbarous acts occur that Fermina Daza had feared. Despite the size of the ship and the luxuries of their stateroom, the first night was a horrible repe-tition of the schooner trip from Riohacha, and her husband, a diligent physician, did not sleep at all so he could comfort her, which was all that an overly distinguished physician knew how to do for seasick-ness. But the storm abated on the third day, after the port of Guayra, and by that time they had spent so much time together and had talked so much that they felt like old friends. On the fourth night, when both resumed their ordinary habits, Dr. Juvenal Urbino was surprised that his young wife did not pray before going to sleep. She was frank with him: the duplicity of the nuns had provoked in her a certain resistance to rituals, but her faith was intact, and she had learned to maintain it in silence. She said: 「I prefer direct communication with God.」

「It would be better for you to come to an understanding with me,」 she said, 「because after me comes His Grace the Archbishop, and it is a different story with him.」

Dr. Urbino understood that she was referring to her hoop skirt, and he seized the opportunity as it flew by. 「Nothing could be sim-pler,」 he said. 「Take it off.」 With the rapid movements of a prestidigitator, he removed his handkerchief from his pocket and covered his eyes with it.

He did not live to see his own glory. When he recognized in himself the irreversible symptoms that he had seen and pitied in others, he did not even attempt a useless struggle but withdrew from the world so as not to infect anyone else. Locked in a utility room at Misericordia Hospital, deaf to the calls of his colleagues and the pleas of his family, removed from the horror of the plague victims dying on the floor in the packed corridors, he wrote a letter of feverish love to his wife and children, a letter of gratitude for his existence in which he revealed how much and with how much fervor he had loved life. It was a farewell of twenty heartrending pages in which the progress of the disease could be observed in the deteriorating script, and it was not necessary to know the writer to realize that he had signed his name with his last breath. In accordance with his instructions, his ashen body was mingled with others in the communal cemetery and was not seen by anyone who loved him.