Love in the Time of Cholera (9 page)

His delirium increased the following week, when he passed Fermina Daza’s house in despair at the siesta hour and saw that she and her aunt were sitting under the almond trees at the doorway. It was an open-air repetition of the scene he had
witnessed the first afternoon in the sewing room: the girl giving a reading lesson to her aunt. But Fermina Daza seemed different without the school uniform, for she wore a narrow tunic with many folds that fell from her shoulders in the Greek style, and on her head she wore a garland of fresh gardenias that made her look like a crowned goddess. Florentino Ariza sat in the park where he was sure he
would be seen, and then he did
not have recourse to his feigned reading but sat with the book open and his eyes fixed on the illusory maiden, who did not even respond with a charitable glance.

At first he thought that the lesson under the almond trees was a casual innovation due, perhaps, to the interminable repairs on the house, but in the days that followed he came to understand that Fermina
Daza would be there, within view, every afternoon at the same time during the three months of vacation, and that certainty filled him with new hope. He did not have the impression that he was seen, he could not detect any sign of interest or rejection, but in her indifference there was a distinct radiance that encouraged him to persevere. Then, one afternoon toward the end of January, the aunt put
her work on the chair and left her niece alone in the doorway under the shower of yellow leaves falling from the almond trees. Encouraged by the impetuous thought that this was an arranged opportunity, Florentino Ariza crossed the street and stopped in front of Fermina Daza, so close to her that he could detect the catches in her breathing and the floral scent that he would identify with her for
the rest of his life. He spoke with his head high and with a determination that would be his again only half a century later, and for the same reason.

“All I ask is that you accept a letter from me,” he said.

It was not the voice that Fermina Daza had expected from him: it was sharp and clear, with a control that had nothing to do with his languid manner. Without lifting her eyes from her embroidery,
she replied: “I cannot accept it without my father’s permission.” Florentino Ariza shuddered at the warmth of that voice, whose hushed tones he was not to forget for the rest of his life. But he held himself steady and replied without hesitation: “Get it.” Then he sweetened the command with a plea: “It is a matter of life and death.” Fermina Daza did not look at him, she did not interrupt
her embroidering, but her decision opened the door a crack, wide enough for the entire world to pass through.

“Come back every afternoon,” she said to him, “and wait until I change my seat.”

Florentino Ariza did not understand what she meant until the following Monday when, from the bench in the little park, he saw the same scene with one variation: when Aunt Escolástica went into
the house,
Fermina Daza stood up and then sat in the other chair. Florentino Ariza, with a white camellia in his lapel, crossed the street and stood in front of her. He said: “This is the greatest moment of my life.” Fermina Daza did not raise her eyes to him, but she looked all around her and saw the deserted streets in the heat of the dry season and a swirl of dead leaves pulled along by the wind.

“Give
it to me,” she said.

Florentino Ariza had intended to give her the seventy sheets he could recite from memory after reading them so often, but then he decided on a sober and explicit half page in which he promised only what was essential: his perfect fidelity and his everlasting love. He took the letter out of his inside jacket pocket and held it before the eyes of the troubled embroiderer, who
had still not dared to look at him. She saw the blue envelope trembling in a hand petrified with terror, and she raised the embroidery frame so he could put the letter on it, for she could not admit that she had noticed the trembling of his fingers. Then it happened: a bird shook himself among the leaves of the almond trees, and his droppings fell right on the embroidery. Fermina Daza moved the
frame out of the way, hid it behind the chair so that he would not notice what had happened, and looked at him for the first time, her face aflame. Florentino Ariza was impassive as he held the letter in his hand and said: “It’s good luck.” She thanked him with her first smile and almost snatched the letter away from him, folded it, and hid it in her bodice. Then he offered her the camellia he wore
in his lapel. She refused: “It is a flower of promises.” Then, conscious that their time was almost over, she again took refuge in her composure.

“Now go,” she said, “and don’t come back until I tell you to.”

After Florentino Ariza saw her for the first time, his mother knew before he told her because he lost his voice and his appetite and spent the entire night tossing and turning in his bed.
But when he began to wait for the answer to his first letter, his anguish was complicated by diarrhea and green vomit, he became disoriented and suffered from sudden fainting spells, and his mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera. Florentino Ariza’s godfather, an old homeopathic practitioner who had been Tránsito Ariza’s
confidant ever since her days as a secret mistress, was also alarmed at first by the patient’s condition,
because he had the weak pulse, the hoarse breathing, and the pale perspiration of a dying man. But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient
and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera. He prescribed infusions of linden blossoms to calm the nerves and suggested a change of air so he could find consolation in distance, but Florentino Ariza longed for just the opposite: to enjoy his martyrdom.

Tránsito Ariza was a freed quadroon whose instinct for happiness had been frustrated
by poverty, and she took pleasure in her son’s suffering as if it were her own. She made him drink the infusions when he became delirious, and she smothered him in wool blankets to keep away the chills, but at the same time she encouraged him to enjoy his prostration.

“Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can,” she said to him, “because these things don’t last your
whole life.”

In the Postal Agency, of course, they did not agree. Florentino Ariza had become negligent, and he was so distracted that he confused the flags that announced the arrival of the mail, and one Wednesday he hoisted the German flag when the ship was from the Leyland Company and carried the mail from Liverpool, and on another day he flew the flag of the United States when the ship was
from the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique and carried the mail from Saint-Nazaire. These confusions of love caused such chaos in the distribution of the mail and provoked so many protests from the public that if Florentino Ariza did not lose his job it was because Lotario Thugut kept him at the telegraph and took him to play the violin in the Cathedral choir. They had a friendship difficult to
understand because of the difference in their ages, for they might have been grandfather and grandson, but they got along at work as well as they did in the taverns around the port, which were frequented by everyone out for the evening regardless of social class, from drunken beggars to young gentlemen in tuxedos who fled the gala parties at the Social Club to eat fried mullet and coconut rice. Lotario
Thugut was in the habit of going there after the last shift at the telegraph office, and dawn often found him drinking Jamaican punch and playing the accordion with
the crews of madmen from the Antillean schooners. He was corpulent and bull-necked, with a golden beard and a liberty cap that he wore when he went out at night, and all he needed was a string of bells to look like St. Nicholas. At
least once a week he ended the evening with a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a transient hotel for sailors. When he met Florentino Ariza, the first thing he did, with a certain magisterial delight, was to initiate him into the secrets of his paradise. He chose for him the little birds he thought best, he discussed their price and style with them and
offered to pay in advance with his own money for their services. But Florentino Ariza did not accept: he was a virgin, and he had decided not to lose his virginity unless it was for love.

The hotel was a colonial palace that had seen better days, and its great marble salons and rooms were divided into plasterboard cubicles with peepholes, which were rented out as much for watching as for doing.
There was talk of busybodies who had their eyes poked out with knitting needles, of a man who recognized his own wife as the woman he was spying on, of well-bred gentlemen who came disguised as tarts to forget who they were with the boatswains on shore leave, and of so many other misadventures of observers and observed that the mere idea of going into the next room terrified Florentino Ariza. And
so Lotario Thugut could never persuade him that watching and letting himself be watched were the refinements of European princes.

As opposed to what his corpulence might suggest, Lotario Thugut had the rosebud genitals of a cherub, but this must have been a fortunate defect, because the most tarnished birds argued over who would have the chance to go to bed with him, and then they shrieked as
if their throats were being cut, shaking the buttresses of the palace and making its ghosts tremble in fear. They said he used an ointment made of snake venom that inflamed women’s loins, but he swore he had no resources other than those that God had given him. He would say with uproarious laughter: “It’s pure love.” Many years had to pass before Florentino Ariza would understand that perhaps he
was right. He was convinced at last, at a more advanced stage of his sentimental education, when he met a man who lived like a king by exploiting three women at the same time. The three of them rendered their accounts at dawn, prostrate at his feet to beg forgiveness for
their meager profits, and the only gratification they sought was that he go to bed with the one who brought him the most money.
Florentino Ariza thought that terror alone could induce such indignities, but one of the three girls surprised him with the contradictory truth.

“These are things,” she said, “you do only for love.”

It was not so much for his talents as a fornicator as for his personal charm that Lotario Thugut had become one of the most esteemed clients of the hotel. Florentino Ariza, because he was so quiet
and elusive, also earned the esteem of the owner, and during the most arduous period of his grief he would lock himself in the suffocating little rooms to read verses and tearful serialized love stories, and his reveries left nests of dark swallows on the balconies and the sound of kisses and the beating of wings in the stillness of siesta. At dusk, when it was cooler, it was impossible not to listen
to the conversations of men who came to console themselves at the end of their day with hurried love. So that Florentino Ariza heard about many acts of disloyalty, and even some state secrets, which important clients and even local officials confided to their ephemeral lovers, not caring if they could be overheard in the adjoining rooms. This was also how he learned that four nautical leagues
to the north of the Sotavento Archipelago, a Spanish galleon had been lying under water since the eighteenth century with its cargo of more than five hundred billion pesos in pure gold and precious stones. The story astounded him, but he did not think of it again until a few months later, when his love awakened in him an overwhelming desire to salvage the sunken treasure so that Fermina Daza could
bathe in showers of gold.

Years later, when he tried to remember what the maiden idealized by the alchemy of poetry really was like, he could not distinguish her from the heartrending twilights of those times. Even when he observed her, unseen, during those days of longing when he waited for a reply to his first letter, he saw her transfigured in the afternoon shimmer of two o’clock in a shower
of blossoms from the almond trees where it was always April regardless of the season of the year. The only reason he was interested in accompanying Lotario Thugut on his violin from the privileged vantage point in the choir was to see how her tunic fluttered in the breeze raised by the canticles. But his own delirium finally interfered with that pleasure, for the mystic music seemed so innocuous
compared with the state of his soul that he
attempted to make it more exciting with love waltzes, and Lotario Thugut found himself obliged to ask that he leave the choir. This was the time when he gave in to his desire to eat the gardenias that Tránsito Ariza grew in pots in the patio, so that he could know the taste of Fermina Daza. It was also the time when he happened to find in one of his
mother’s trunks a liter bottle of the cologne that the sailors from the Hamburg-American Line sold as contraband, and he could not resist the temptation to sample it in order to discover other tastes of his beloved. He continued to drink from the bottle until dawn, and he became drunk on Fermina Daza in abrasive swallows, first in the taverns around the port and then as he stared out to sea from the
jetties where lovers without a roof over their heads made consoling love, until at last he succumbed to unconsciousness. Tránsito Ariza, who had waited for him until six o’clock in the morning with her heart in her mouth, searched for him in the most improbable hiding places, and a short while after noon she found him wallowing in a pool of fragrant vomit in a cove of the bay where drowning victims
washed ashore.

She took advantage of the hiatus of his convalescence to reproach him for his passivity as he waited for the answer to his letter. She reminded him that the weak would never enter the kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom, and that women give themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide the security they need in order to face life. Florentino Ariza
learned the lesson, perhaps too well. Tránsito Ariza could not hide a feeling of pride, more carnal than maternal, when she saw him leave the notions shop in his black suit and stiff felt hat, his lyrical bow tie and celluloid collar, and she asked him as a joke if he was going to a funeral. He answered, his ears flaming: “It’s almost the same thing.” She realized that he could hardly breathe with
fear, but his determination was invincible. She gave him her final warnings and her blessing, and laughing for all she was worth, she promised him another bottle of cologne so they could celebrate his victory together.