Love in the Time of Cholera (43 page)

Prudencia Pitre had not forgotten his scratching signal at the door, the one he had used to identify himself when they thought they were still young although they no longer were, and she opened the door without any questions. The street was dark, he was barely visible in his black suit, his stiff
hat, and his bat’s umbrella hanging over his arm, and her eyes were too weak to see him except in full light, but she recognized him by the gleam of the streetlamp on the metal frame of his eyeglasses. He looked like a murderer with blood still on his hands.

“Sanctuary for a poor orphan,” he said.

It was the only thing he could think of to say, just to say something. He was surprised at how
much she had aged since the last time he saw her, and he was aware that she saw him the same way. But he consoled himself by thinking that in a moment, when they had both
recovered from the initial shock, they would notice fewer and fewer of the blows that life had dealt the other, and they would again seem as young as they had been when they first met.

“You look as if you are going to a funeral,”
she said.

It was true. She, along with almost the entire city, had been at the window since eleven o’clock, watching the largest and most sumptuous funeral procession that had been seen here since the death of Archbishop De Luna. She had been awakened from her siesta by the thundering artillery that made the earth tremble, by the dissonances of the marching bands, the confusion of funeral hymns
over the clamoring bells in all the churches, which had been ringing without pause since the previous day. From her balcony she had seen the cavalry in dress uniform, the religious communities, the schools, the long black limousines of an invisible officialdom, the carriage drawn by horses in feathered headdresses and gold trappings, the flag-draped yellow coffin on the gun carriage of a historic
cannon, and at the very end a line of old open Victorias that kept themselves alive in order to carry funeral wreaths. As soon as they had passed by Prudencia Pitre’s balcony, a little after midday, the deluge came and the funeral procession dispersed in a wild stampede.

“What an absurd way to die,” she said.

“Death has no sense of the ridiculous,” he said, and added in sorrow: “above all at
our age.”

They were seated on the terrace, facing the open sea, looking at the ringed moon that took up half the sky, looking at the colored lights of the boats along the horizon, enjoying the mild, perfumed breeze after the storm. They drank port and ate pickles on slices of country bread that Prudencia Pitre cut from a loaf in the kitchen. They had spent many nights like this after she had
been left a widow without children. Florentino Ariza had met her at a time when she would have received any man who wanted to be with her, even if he were hired by the hour, and they had established a relationship that was more serious and longer-lived than would have seemed possible.

Although she never even hinted at it, she would have sold her soul to the devil to marry him. She knew that it
would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to ask for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no
man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love. But no other man was as elusive either, so that their love never went beyond the
point it always reached for him: the point where it would not interfere with his determination to remain free for Fermina Daza. Nevertheless, it lasted many years, even after he had arranged for Prudencia Pitre to marry a salesman who was home for three months and traveled for the next three and with whom she had a daughter and four sons, one of whom, she swore, was Florentino Ariza’s.

They talked,
not concerned about the hour, because both were accustomed to sharing the sleepless nights of their youth, and they had much less to lose in the sleeplessness of old age. Although he almost never had more than two glasses of wine, Florentino Ariza still had not caught his breath after the third. He was dripping with perspiration, and the Widow of Two told him to take off his jacket, his vest,
his trousers, to take off everything if he liked, what the hell: after all, they knew each other better naked than dressed. He said he would if she did the same, but she refused: some time ago she had looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror and suddenly realized that she would no longer have the courage to allow anyone—not him, not anyone—to see her undressed.

Florentino Ariza, in a state of
agitation that he could not calm with four glasses of port, talked at length about the same subject: the past, the good memories from the past, for he was desperate to find the hidden road in the past that would bring him relief. For that was what he needed: to let his soul escape through his mouth. When he saw the first light of dawn on the horizon, he attempted an indirect approach. He asked, in
a way that seemed casual: “What would you do if someone proposed marriage to you, just as you are, a widow of your age?” She laughed with a wrinkled old woman’s laugh, and asked in turn:

“Are you speaking of the Widow Urbino?”

Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women, and Prudencia Pitre more than any other, always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than
about the questions themselves. Filled with sudden terror because of her chilling marksmanship, he slipped through the back door: “I am speaking of you.” She laughed again: “Go make fun of your bitch of a mother, may she
rest in peace.” Then she urged him to say what he meant to say, because she knew that he, or any other man, would not have awakened her at three o’clock in the morning after so
many years of not seeing her just to drink port and eat country bread with pickles. She said: “You do that only when you are looking for someone to cry with.” Florentino Ariza withdrew in defeat.

“For once you are wrong,” he said. “My reasons tonight have more to do with singing.”

“Let’s sing, then,” she said.

And she began to sing, in a very good voice, the song that was popular then:
Ramona,
I cannot live without you
. The night was over, for he did not dare to play forbidden games with a woman who had proven too many times that she knew the dark side of the moon. He walked out into a different city, one that was perfumed by the last dahlias of June, and onto a street out of his youth, where the shadowy widows from five o’clock Mass were filing by. But now it was he, not they, who
crossed the street, so they would not see the tears he could no longer hold back, not his midnight tears, as he thought, but other tears: the ones he had been swallowing for fifty-one years, nine months and four days.

He had lost all track of time, and did not know where he was when he awoke facing a large, dazzling window. The voice of América Vicuña playing ball in the garden with the servant
girls brought him back to reality: he was in his mother’s bed. He had kept her bedroom intact, and he would sleep there to feel less alone on the few occasions when he was troubled by his solitude. Across from the bed hung the large mirror from Don Sancho’s Inn, and he had only to see it when he awoke to see Fermina Daza reflected in its depths. He knew that it was Saturday, because that was the
day the chauffeur picked up América Vicuña at her boarding school and brought her back to his house. He realized that he had slept without knowing it, dreaming that he could not sleep, in a dream that had been disturbed by the wrathful face of Fermina Daza. He bathed, wondering what his next step should be, he dressed very slowly in his best clothing, he dabbed on cologne and waxed the ends of his
white mustache, he left the bedroom, and from the second-floor hallway he saw the beautiful child in her uniform catching the ball with the grace that had made him tremble on so many Saturdays but this morning did not disquiet
him in the least. He indicated that she should come with him, and before he climbed into the automobile he said, although it was not necessary: “Today we are not going to
do our things.” He took her to the American Ice Cream Shop, filled at this hour with parents eating ice cream with their children under the long blades of the fans that hung from the smooth ceiling. América Vicuña ordered an enormous glass filled with layers of ice cream, each a different color, her favorite dish and the one that was the most popular because it gave off an aura of magic. Florentino
Ariza drank black coffee and looked at the girl without speaking, while she ate the ice cream with a spoon that had a very long handle so that one could reach the bottom of the glass. Still looking at her, he said without warning:

“I am going to marry.”

She looked into his eyes with a flash of uncertainty, her spoon suspended in midair, but then she recovered and smiled.

“That’s a lie,” she
said. “Old men don’t marry.”

That afternoon he left her at her school under a steady downpour just as the Angelus was ringing, after the two of them had watched the puppet show in the park, had lunch at the fried-fish stands on the jetties, seen the caged animals in the circus that had just come to town, bought all kinds of candies at the outdoor stalls to take back to school, and driven around
the city several times with the top down, so that she could become accustomed to the idea that he was her guardian and no longer her lover. On Sunday he sent the automobile for her in the event she wanted to take a drive with her friends, but he did not want to see her, because since the previous week he had come to full consciousness of both their ages. That night he decided to write a letter
of apology to Fermina Daza, its only purpose to show that he had not given up, but he put it off until the next day. On Monday, after exactly three weeks of agony, he walked into his house, soaked by the rain, and found her letter.

It was eight o’clock at night. The two servant girls were in bed, and they had left on the light in the hallway that lit Florentino Ariza’s way to his bedroom. He
knew that his Spartan, bland supper was on the table in the dining room, but the slight hunger he felt after so many days of haphazard eating vanished with the emotional upheaval of the letter. His hands were shaking so much that it was difficult for him to turn on the overhead light in the bedroom. He put the rain-soaked
letter on the bed, lit the lamp on the night table, and with the feigned
tranquillity that was his customary way of calming himself, he took off his wet jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, he took off his vest, folded it with care, and placed it on top of the jacket, he took off his black silk string tie and the celluloid collar that was no longer fashionable in the world, he unbuttoned his shirt down to his waist and loosened his belt so that he could breathe
with greater ease, and at last he took off his hat and put it by the window to dry. Then he began to tremble because he did not know where the letter was, and his nervous excitement was so great that he was surprised when he found it, for he did not remember placing it on the bed. Before opening it, he dried the envelope with his handkerchief, taking care not to smear the ink in which his name was
written, and as he did so it occurred to him that the secret was no longer shared by two people but by three, at least, for whoever had delivered it must have noticed that only three weeks after the death of her husband, the Widow Urbino was writing to someone who did not belong to her world, and with so much urgency that she did not use the regular mails and so much secretiveness that she had
ordered that it not be handed to anyone but slipped under the door instead, as if it were an anonymous letter. He did not have to tear open the envelope, for the water had dissolved the glue, but the letter was dry: three closely written pages with no salutation, and signed with the initials of her married name.

He sat on the bed and read it through once as quickly as he could, more intrigued
by the tone than by the content, and before he reached the second page he knew that it was in fact the insulting letter he-had expected to receive. He laid it, unfolded, in the light shed by the bed-lamp, he took off his shoes and his wet socks, he turned out the overhead light, using the switch next to the door, and at last he put on his chamois mustache cover and lay down without removing his trousers
and shirt, his head supported by two large pillows that he used as a backrest for reading. Now he read it again, this time syllable by syllable, scrutinizing each so that none of the letter’s secret intentions would be hidden from him, and then he read it four more times, until he was so full of the written words that they began to lose all meaning. At last he placed it, without the envelope,
in the drawer of the night table, lay on his back with his hands behind his head, and for
four hours he did not blink, he hardly breathed, he was more dead than a dead man, as he stared into the space in the mirror where she had been. Precisely at midnight he went to the kitchen and prepared a thermos of coffee as thick as crude oil, then he took it to his room, put his false teeth into the glass
of boric acid solution that he always found ready for him on the night table, and resumed the posture of a recumbent marble statue, with momentary shifts in position when he took a sip of coffee, until the maid came in at six o’clock with a fresh thermos.

Florentino Ariza knew by then what one of his next steps was going to be. In truth, the insults caused him no pain, and he was not concerned
with rectifying the unjust accusations that could have been worse, considering Fermina Daza’s character and the gravity of the cause. All that interested him was that the letter, in and of itself, gave him the opportunity, and even recognized his right, to respond. Even more: it demanded that he respond. So that life was now at the point where he had wanted it to be. Everything else depended on
him, and he was convinced that his private hell of over half a century’s duration would still present him with many mortal challenges, which he was prepared to confront with more ardor and more sorrow and more love than he had brought to any of them before now, because these would be the last.

When he went to his office five days after receiving the letter from Fermina Daza, he felt as if he
were floating in an abrupt and unusual absence of the noise of the typewriters, whose sound, like rain, had become less noticeable than silence. It was a moment of calm. When the sound began again, Florentino Ariza went to Leona Cassiani’s office and watched her as she sat in front of her own personal typewriter, which responded to her fingertips as if it were human. She knew she was being observed,
and she looked toward the door with her awesome solar smile, but she did not stop typing until the end of the paragraph.