“It is better to arrive in time than to be invited.”

She thought she would die of joy. Without time to think about it, she washed her hands as well as she could while she murmured: “Thank you, God, thank you, how good you are,” thinking that she had not yet bathed because of the damned eggplant that Hildebranda had asked her to prepare without telling her who was coming to lunch, thinking that she looked so old and ugly and that her face was so raw from the sun that he would regret having come when he saw her like this, damn it. But she dried her hands the best she could on her apron, arranged her appearance the best she could, called on all the haughtiness she had been born with to calm her maddened heart, and went to meet the man with her sweet doe’s gait, her head high, her eyes shining, her nose ready for battle, and grateful to her fate for the immense relief of going home, but not as pliant as he thought, of course, because she would be happy to leave with him, of course, but she was also determined to make him pay with her silence for the bitter suffering that had ended her life.

One night he went to Don Sancho’s Inn, an elegant colonial restaurant, and sat in the most remote corner, as was his custom when he ate his frugal meals alone. All at once, in the large mirror on the back wall, he caught a glimpse of Fermina Daza sitting at a table with her husband and two other couples, at an angle that allowed him to see her reflected in all her splendor. She was unguarded, she engaged in conversation with grace and laughter that exploded like fireworks, and her beauty was more radiant under the enormous teardrop chandeliers: once again, Alice had gone through the looking glass.

It goes without saying that to close the ceremony he sang the “addio alla vita” from Tosca. He sang it a capella, which was the style he preferred, in a voice that was still steady. Florentino Ariza was moved, but he showed it only in the slight tremor in his voice as he expressed his thanks. In just the same way that he had done and thought everything he had done and thought in life, he had scaled the heights only because of his fierce determination to be alive and in good health at the moment he would fulfill his destiny in the shadow of Fermina Daza.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say, not without a certain cynicism, that it was not he who was to blame for those two bitter years of his life but his wife’s bad habit of smelling the clothes her family took off, and the clothes that she herself took off, so that she could tell by the odor if they needed to be laundered even though they might appear to be clean. She had done this ever since she was a girl, and she never thought it worthy of comment until her husband realized what she was doing on their wedding night. He also knew that she locked herself in the bathroom at least three times a day to smoke, but this did not attract his attention because the women of his class were in the habit of locking themselves away in groups to talk about men and smoke, and even to drink as much as two liters of aguardiente until they had passed out on the floor in a brickmason’s drunken stupor.

This was at the time that his mother died and Florentino Ariza was left alone in his house. It was a haven that suited his way of loving, because the location was discreet despite the fact that the numerous windows that gave the street its name made one think of too many eyes behind the curtains. But the house had been built to make Fermina Daza, and no one but Fermina Daza, happy, so that Florentino Ariza preferred to lose a good many opportunities during his most fruitful years rather than soil his house with other loves.

Until that time his greatest battle, fought tooth and nail and lost without glory, was against baldness. From the moment he saw the first hairs tangled in his comb, he knew that he was condemned to a hell whose torments cannot be imagined by those who do not suffer them. He struggled for years. There was not a pomade or lotion he did not try, a belief he did not accept, a sacrifice he did not endure, in order to defend every inch of his head against the ravages of that devastation. He memorized the agricultural informa-tion in the Bristol Almanac because he had heard that there was a direct relationship between the growth of hair and the harvesting cycles. He left the totally bald barber he had used all his life for a foreign newcomer who cut hair only when the moon was in the first quarter. The new barber had begun to demonstrate that in fact he had a fertile hand, when it was discovered that he was wanted by several Antillean police forces for raping novices, and he was taken away in chains.

All the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearance in his body. He felt the shape of his liver with such clarity that he could tell its size without touching it. He felt the dozing cat’s purr of his kidneys, he felt the iridescent brilliance of his vesicles, he felt the humming blood in his arteries. At times he awoke at dawn gasping for air, like a fish out of water. He had fluid in his heart. He felt it lose the beat for a moment, he felt it syncopate like a school marching band, once, twice, and then, because God is good, he felt it recover at last. But instead of having recourse to the same distracting remedies he gave to his patients, he went mad with terror. It was true: all he needed in life, even at the age of fifty-eight, was someone who understood him. So he turned to Fermina Daza, the person who loved him best and whom he loved best in the world, and with whom he had just eased his conscience.

He forgot Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s funeral. He left the girl at the door of the school with a hurried promise that he would come back for her the following Saturday, and he told the driver to take him to the house of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He was confronted by an uproar of automobiles and hired carriages in the surrounding streets and a multitude of curious onlookers outside the house. The guests of Dr. Lácides Olivella, who had received the bad news at the height of the celebration, came rushing in. It was not easy to move inside the house because of the crowd, but Florentino Ariza managed to make his way to the master bedroom, peered on tiptoe over the groups of peo-ple blocking the door, and saw Juvenal Urbino in the conjugal bed as he had wanted to see him since he had first heard of him--wallow-ing in the indignity of death. The carpenter had just taken his measure-ments for the coffin, and at his side, still wearing the dress of a newly-wed grandmother that she had put on for the party, Fermina Daza was introspective and dejected.

There was no solution. In a city like this, it was impossible to hide an illness when the Doctor’s carriage stood at the door. At times the Doctor himself took the initiative and went on foot, if distance permitted, or in a hired carriage, to avoid malicious or premature assumptions. Such deceptions, however, were to little avail. Since the prescriptions ordered in pharmacies revealed the truth, Dr. Urbino would always prescribe counterfeit medicines along with the correct ones in order to preserve the sacred right of the sick to die in peace along with the secret of their illness. Similarly, he was able in various truthful ways to account for the presence of his carriage outside the house of Miss Lynch, but he could not allow it to stay there too long, least of all for the amount of time he would have desired, which was the rest of his life.

Florentino Ariza would hire a Victoria after a hard day at the office, but instead of folding down the top, as was customary during the hot months, he would stay hidden in the depths of the seat, invisible in the darkness, always alone, and requesting unexpected routes so as not to arouse the evil thoughts of the driver. In reality, the only thing that interested him on the drive was the pink marble Parthenon half hidden among leafy banana and mango trees, a luckless replica of the idyllic mansions on Louisiana cotton plantations. Fermina Daza’s children returned home a little before five. Florentino Ariza would see them arrive in the family carriage, and then he would see Dr. Juvenal Urbino leave for his routine house calls, but in almost a year of vigilance he never even caught the glimpse he so desired.

When doctor’s orders forced his uncle into retirement, Florentino Ariza began, with good grace, to sacrifice some of his Sunday loves. He accompanied his uncle to his country retreat in one of the city’s first automobiles, whose crank handle had such a powerful recoil that it had dislocated the shoulder of the first driver. They talked for many hours, the old man in the hammock with his name em-broidered in silk thread, removed from everything and with his back to the sea, in the old slave plantation from whose terraces, filled with crepe myrtle, one could see the snow-covered peaks of the sierra in the afternoon. It had always been difficult for Florentino Ariza and his uncle to talk about anything other than river navigation, and it still was on those slow afternoons when death was always an unseen guest. One of Uncle Leo XII’s constant preoccupations was that river navigation not pass into the hands of entrepreneurs from the interior with connections to European corporations. “This has always been a business run by people from the coast,” he would say. “If the inlanders get hold of it, they will give it back to the Germans.” His preoccupation was consistent with a political conviction that he liked to repeat even when it was not to the point.

The offices were closed and dark because of the holiday, and at the deserted dock there was only one ship, its boilers damped. The sultry weather presaged the first rains of the year, but the transparent air and the Sunday silence in the harbor seemed to belong to a more benevolent month. The world was harsher here than in the shadowy cabin, and the bells caused greater grief, even if one did not know for whom they tolled. Florentino Ariza and the girl went down to the patio of saltpeter, which the Spaniards had used as a port for blacks and where there were still the remains of weights and other rusted irons from the slave trade. The automobile was waiting for them in the shade of the warehouses, and they did not awaken the driver, asleep with his head on the steering wheel, until they were settled in their seats. The automobile turned around behind the warehouses en-closed by chicken wire, crossed the area of the old market on Las ánimas Bay, where near-naked adults were playing ball, and drove out of the river harbor in a burning cloud of dust. Florentino Ariza was sure that the funerary honors could not be for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, but the insistent tolling filled him with doubts. He put his hand on the driver’s shoulder and asked him, shouting into his ear, for whom the bells tolled.

The world became a hell for him. For once the initial madness was sated, they both became aware of the risks involved, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino never had the resolve to face a scandal. In the deliriums of passion he promised everything, but when it was over, everything was left for later. On the other hand, as his desire to be with her grew, so did his fear of losing her, so that their meetings became more and more hurried and problematic. He thought about nothing else. He waited for the afternoons with unbearable longing, he forgot his other commitments, he forgot everything but her, but as his carriage approached the Mala Crianza salt marsh he prayed to God that an unforeseen obstacle would force it to drive past. He went to her in a state of such anguish that at times as he turned the corner he was glad to catch a glimpse of the woolly head of the Reverend Lynch, who read on the terrace while his daughter cate-chized neighborhood children in the living room with recited passages of scripture. Then he would go home relieved that he was not defying fate again, but later he would feel himself going mad with the desire for it to be five o’clock in the afternoon all day, every day.

One afternoon when he insisted on his solitary drive despite the first devastating rains of June, the horse slipped and fell in the mud. Florentino Ariza realized with horror that they were just in front of Fermina Daza’s villa, and he pleaded with the driver, not thinking that his consternation might betray him.

As he carried on his investigation, he learned about other events he had not known of or into which he had made no inquiries, including the death of Lorenzo Daza in the Cantabrian village where he had been born. He remembered seeing him for many years in the rowdy chess wars at the Parish Café, hoarse with so much talking, and growing fatter and rougher as he sank into the quicksand of an un-fortunate old age. They had never exchanged another word since their disagreeable breakfast of anise in the previous century, and Florentino Ariza was certain that even after he had obtained for his daughter the successful marriage that had become his only reason for living, Lorenzo Daza remembered him with as much rancor as he felt toward Lorenzo Daza. But he was so determined to find out the unequivocal facts regarding Fermina Daza’s health that he re-turned to the Parish Café to learn them from her father, just at the time of the historic tournament in which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour alone confronted forty-two opponents. This was how he discovered that Lorenzo Daza had died, and he rejoiced with all his heart, although the price of his joy might be having to live without the truth. At last he accepted as true the story of the hospital for the terminally ill, and his only consolation was the old saying: Sick women live forever. On the days when he felt disheartened, he re-signed himself to the notion that the news of Fermina Daza’s death, if it should occur, would find him without his having to look for it.

To his good fortune, every step he climbed in the R.C.C. brought new privileges, above all secret privileges, and one of the most practical was the possibility of using the offices at night, or on Sundays or holidays, with the complicity of the watchmen. Once, when he was First Vice President, he was making emergency love to one of the Sunday girls, sitting on a desk chair with her astride him, when the door opened without warning. Uncle Leo XII peered in, as if he had walked into the wrong office, and stared at his terrified nephew over his eyeglasses. “I’ll be damned!” said his uncle, without the least sign of shock. “You screw just like your dad!” And before he closed the door, he said, with his eyes looking off into the distance:

Florentino Ariza had imagined that moment down to the last detail since the days of his youth when he had devoted himself completely to the cause of his reckless love. For her sake he had won fame and fortune without too much concern for his methods, for her sake he had cared for his health and personal appearance with a rigor that did not seem very manly to other men of his time, and he had waited for this day as no one else could have waited for anything or anyone in this world: without an instant of discouragement. The proof that death had at last interceded on his behalf filled him with the courage he needed to repeat his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love to Fermina Daza on her-first night of widowhood.

The years of immobilized waiting, of hoping for good luck, were behind him, but on the horizon he could see nothing more than the unfathomable sea of imaginary illnesses, the drop-by-drop urinations of sleepless nights, the daily death at twilight. He thought that all the moments in the day, which had once been his allies and sworn accomplices, were beginning to conspire against him. A few years before he had gone to a dangerous assignation, his heart heavy with terror of what might happen, and he had found the door unlocked and the hinges recently oiled so that he could come in without a sound, but he repented at the last moment for fear of causing a decent married woman irreparable harm by dying in her bed. So that it was reasonable to think that the woman he loved most on earth, the one he had waited for from one century to the next without a sigh of disenchantment, might not have the opportunity to lead him by the arm across a street full of lunar grave mounds and beds of wind-blown poppies in order to help him reach the other side of death in safety.

He remembered Andrea Varón, outside whose house he had spent the previous week, but the orange light in the bathroom had been a warning that he could not go in: someone had arrived before him. Someone: man or woman, because Andrea Varón did not hesitate over such details when it came to the follies of love. Of all those on the list, she was the only one who earned a living with her body, but she did so at her pleasure and without a business manager. In her day she had enjoyed a legendary career as a clandestine courtesan who deserved her nom de guerre, Our Lady of Everybody. She drove governors and admirals mad, she watched eminent heroes of arms and letters who were not as illustrious as they believed, and even some who were, as they wept on her shoulder. It was true, however, that President Rafael Reyes, after only a hurried half hour between appointments in the city, granted her a lifetime pension for distinguished service to the Ministry of Finance, where she had never worked a day of her life. She distributed her gifts of pleasure as far as her body could reach, and although her indecent conduct was public knowledge, no one could have made a definitive case against her, because her eminent accomplices gave her the same pro-tection they gave themselves, knowing that they had more to lose in a scandal than she did.

Miss Barbara Lynch, Doctor of Theology, was the only child of the Reverend Jonathan B. Lynch, a lean black Protestant minister who rode on a mule through the poverty-stricken settlements in the salt marshes, preaching the word of one of the many gods that Dr. Juvenal Urbino wrote with a small g to distinguish them from his. She spoke good Spanish, with a certain roughness in the syntax, and her frequent slips heightened her charm. She would be twenty-eight years old in December, not long ago she had divorced another minister, who was a student of her father’s and to whom she had been unhappily married for two years, and she had no desire to repeat the offense. She said: “I have no more love than my troupial.” But Dr. Urbino was too serious to think that she said it with hidden intentions. On the contrary: he asked himself in bewilderment if so many opportunities coming together might not be one of God’s pitfalls, which he would then have to pay for dearly, but he dis-missed the thought without delay as a piece of theological nonsense resulting from his state of confusion.

It was his final act. He did not speak of business again, he did not even allow anyone to consult with him, he did not lose a single ringlet from his splendid imperial head or an iota of his lucidity, but he did everything possible to keep anyone from seeing him who might pity him. He passed the days in contemplation of the perpetual snows from his terrace, rocking slowly in a Viennese rocker next to a table where the servants always kept a pot of black coffee hot for him, along with a glass of water with boric acid that contained two plates of false teeth, which he no longer used except to receive visitors. He saw very few friends, and he would speak only of a past so remote that it antedated river navigation. But he still had one new topic of conversation left: his desire that Florentino Ariza marry. He expressed his wish to him several times, and always in the same way:

From then on, he kept spare sets of teeth everywhere, in various places throughout his house, in his desk drawer, and on each of the three company boats. Moreover, when he ate out he would carry an extra pair in a cough drop box that he kept in his pocket, because he had once broken a pair trying to eat pork cracklings at a picnic. Fearing that his nephew might be the victim of similar unpleasant surprises, Uncle Leo XII told Dr. Adonay to make him two sets right from the start: one of cheap materials for daily use at the office, and the other for Sundays and holidays, with a gold chip in the first molar that would impart a touch of realism. At last, on a Palm Sunday ringing with the sound of holiday bells, Florentino Ariza returned to the street with a new identity, his perfect smile giving him the impression that someone else had taken his place in the world.

It was so tremulous a confession that it might have inspired pity. But she saved him from all harm with a laugh that lit up the bedroom.

She was able to draw no conclusions, because her husband’s patients, except for mutual friends, were part of his private domain; they were people without identity, known not by their faces but by their pains, not by the color of their eyes or the evasions of their hearts but by the size of their livers, the coating on their tongues, the blood in their urine, the hallucinations of their feverish nights. They were people who believed in her husband, who believed they lived because of him when in reality they lived for him, and who in th九_九_藏_书_网e end were reduced to a phrase written in his own hand at the bottom of the medical file: Be calm. God awaits you at the door. Fermina Daza left his study after two fruitless hours, with the feeling that she had allowed herself to be seduced by indecency.

Most of his business associates viewed those disputes as if they were matrimonial arguments, in which both parties are right. The old man’s obstinacy seemed natural to them, not because, as it was too easy to say, old age had made him less visionary than he had always been, but because renouncing the monopoly must have seemed to him like throwing away the victories of a historic battle that he and his brothers had waged unaided, back in heroic times, against powerful adversaries from all over the world. Which is why no one opposed him when he kept so tight a hold on his rights that no one could touch them before their legal expiration. But suddenly, when Florentino Ariza had already surrendered his weapons during those meditative afternoons on the plantation, Uncle Leo XII agreed to renounce the centenarian privilege, on the one honorable condition that it not take place before his death.

“You might as well have told a snake charmer in the market,” she said.

“It must be for Pentecost,” she said.

ON THE OCCASION of the celebration of the new century, there was an innovative program of public ceremonies, the most memorable of which was the first journey in a balloon, the fruit of the boundless initiative of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Half the city gathered on the Arsenal Beach to express their wonderment at the ascent of the enormous balloon made of taffeta in the colors of the flag, which carried the first airmail to San Juan de la Ciénaga, some thirty leagues to the northeast as the crow flies. Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife, who had experienced the excitement of flight at the World’s Fair in Paris, were the first to climb into the wicker basket, followed by the pilot and six distinguished guests. They were carrying a letter from the Governor of the Province to the municipal officials of San Juan de la Ciénaga, in which it was documented for all time that this was the first mail transported through the air. A journalist from the Commercial Daily asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino for his final words in the event he perished during the adventure, and he did not even take the time to think about the answer that would earn him so much abuse.

In the year 1900, while the Civil War of a Thousand Days bled the country, an Italian who made custom-fitted wigs of human hair came to the city. The wigs cost a fortune, and the manufacturer took no responsibility after three months of use, but there were few solvent bald men who did not succumb to the temptation. Florentino Ariza was one of the first. He tried on a wig that was so similar to his own hair that he was afraid it would stand on end with his changes in mood, but he could not accept the idea of wearing a dead man’s hair on his head. His only consolation was that his raging baldness meant that he would not have to watch his hair turn gray. One day, one of the genial drunks on the river docks embraced him with more enthusiasm than usual when he saw him leave the office, and then he removed Florentino Ariza’s hat, to the mocking laughter of the stevedores, and gave him a resounding kiss on the head.

Fatigue overcame him for a few minutes. When he awoke, she had lit her dim bedside lamp and lay there with her eyes open, but without crying. Something definitive had happened to her while he slept: the sediment that had accumulated at the bottom of her life over the course of so many years had been stirred up by the torment of her jealousy and had floated to the surface, and it had aged her all at once. Shocked by her sudden wrinkles, her faded lips, the ashes in her hair, he risked telling her that she should try to sleep: it was after two o’clock. She spoke, not looking at him but with no trace of rage in her voice, almost with gentleness.

He did so, looking without seeing her through the fog of his reading glasses, but he did not have to take them off to feel burned by the raging fire in her eyes.

“Doctor.”

Florentino Ariza trembled at the idea of his labor of so many years being frustrated at the last moment by this unforeseen circum-stance. He would have preferred to renounce everything, throw it all away, die, rather than fail Fermina Daza. Fortunately, Uncle Leo XII did not insist. When he turned ninety-two, he recognized his nephew as sole heir and retired from the company.

They had just made love on Pentecost Sunday when the bells began to toll at four o’clock. Florentino Ariza had to overcome the wild beating of his heart. In his youth, the ritual of the tolling bells had been included in the price of the funeral and was denied only to the indigent. But after our last war, just at the turn of the century, the Conservative regime consolidated its colonial customs, and funeral rites became so expensive that only the wealthiest could pay for them. When Archbishop Dante de Luna died, bells all over the province tolled unceasingly for nine days and nine nights, and the public suffering was so great that his successor reserved the tolling of bells for the funeral services of the most illustrious of the dead. Therefore, when Florentino Ariza heard the Cathedral bells at four o’clock in the afternoon on a Pentecost Sunday, he felt as if he had been visited by a ghost from his lost youth. He never imagined they were the bells he had so longed to hear for so many years, ever since the Sunday when he saw Fermina Daza in her sixth month of pregnancy as she was leaving High Mass.

In the three weeks that followed, Fermina Daza did not find the odor in his clothing for a few days, she found it again when she least expected it, and then she found it, stronger than ever, for several days in a row, although one of those days was a Sunday when there had been a family gathering and the two of them had not been apart for even a moment. Contrary to her normal custom and even her own desires, she found herself in her husband’s office one after-noon as if she were someone else, doing something that she would never do, deciphering with an exquisite Bengalese magnifying glass his intricate notes on the house calls he had made during the last few months.

He did not eat, he said his prayers without conviction, in bed he pretended to continue his siesta reading while his wife walked round and round the house putting the world in order before going to bed. As he nodded over his book, he began to sink down into the in-evitable mangrove swamp of Miss Lynch, into her air of a recumbent forest glade, his deathbed, and then he could think of nothing ex-cept tomorrow’s five minutes to five o’clock in the afternoon and her waiting for him in bed with nothing but the mound of her dark bush under her madwoman’s skirt from Jamaica: the hellish circle.

Years before, during the crisis of a dangerous illness, he had spoken of the possibility of dying, and she had made the same brutal reply. Dr. Urbino attributed it to the natural hardheartedness of women, which allows the earth to continue revolving around the sun, because at that time he did not know that she always erected a barrier of wrath to hide her fear. And in this case it was the most terrible one of all, the fear of losing him.

When the lights went on, he waited for the others to stand up. Then he stood, unhurried, and turned around in a distracted way as he buttoned his vest that he always opened during a performance, and the four of them found themselves so close to one another that they would have been obliged to exchange greetings even if one of them had not wanted to. First Juvenal Urbino greeted Leona Cassiani, whom he knew well, and then he shook Florentino Ariza’s hand with his customary gallantry. Fermina Daza smiled at both of them with courtesy, only courtesy, but in any event with the smile of someone who had seen them often, who knew who they were, and who therefore did not need an introduction. Leona Cassiani re-sponded with her mulatta grace. But Florentino Ariza did not know what to do, because he was flabbergasted at the sight of her.

But he reassured her: it was insomnia again, as always, and once more he bit his tongue to keep the truth from pouring out through the bleeding wounds in his heart. The rain did not allow him a moment of sun to think in. He spent another unreal week unable to concentrate on anything, eating badly and sleeping worse, trying to find the secret signs that would show him the road to sal-vation. But on Friday he was invaded by an unreasoning calm, which he interpreted as an omen that nothing new was going to happen, that everything he had done in his life had been in vain, that he could not go on: it was the end. On Monday, however, when he returned to his house on the Street of Windows, he discovered a letter floating in a puddle inside the entrance, and on the wet envelope he recognized at once the imperious handwriting that so many changes in life had not changed, and he even thought he could detect the nocturnal per-fume of withered gardenias, because after the initial shock, his heart told him everything: it was the letter he had been waiting for, without a moment’s respite, for over half a century.

First she smelled the jacket and the vest while she took the watch chain out of the buttonhole and removed the pencil holder and the billfold and the loose change from the pockets and placed everything on the dresser, and then she smelled the hemmed shirt as she removed the tiepin and the topaz cuff links and the gold collar button, and then she smelled the trousers as she removed the keyholder with its eleven keys and the penknife with its mother-of-pearl handle, and finally she smelled the underwear and the socks and the linen handkerchief with the embroidered monogram. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there was an odor in each of the articles that had not been there in all their years of life together, an odor impossible to define because it was not the scent of flowers or of artificial essences but of something peculiar to human nature. She said nothing, and she did not notice the odor every day, but she now sniffed at her husband’s clothing not to decide if it was ready to launder but with an un-bearable anxiety that gnawed at her innermost being.

From that night on, and for almost a year afterward, he laid un-relenting siege to the owner of the inn, offering him whatever he wanted, money or favors or whatever he desired most in life, if he would sell him the mirror. It was not easy, because old Don Sancho believed the legend that the beautiful frame, carved by Viennese cabinetmakers, was the twin of another, which had belonged to Marie Antoinette and had disappeared without a trace: a pair of unique jewels. When at last he surrendered, Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in his house, not for the exquisite frame but because of the place inside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved reflection.

They were in full agreement. She behaved like what she was, a girl ready to learn about life under the guidance of a venerable old man who was not shocked by anything, and he chose to behave like what he had most feared being in his life: a senile lover. He never identified her with the young Fermina Daza despite a resemblance that was more than casual and was not based only on their age, their school uniform, their braid, their untamed walk, and even their haughty and unpredictable character. Moreover, the idea of replace-ment, which had been so effective an inducement for his mendicancy of love, had been completely erased from his mind. He liked her for what she was, and he came to love her for what she was, in a fever of crepuscular delights. She was the only one with whom he took drastic precautions against accidental pregnancy. After half a dozen encounters, there was no dream for either of them except their Sunday afternoons.

That, along with so many other ephemeral images in the course of so many years, would suddenly appear to Florentino Ariza at the whim of fate, and disappear again in the same way, leaving behind a throb of longing in his heart. Taken together, they marked the passage of his life, for he experienced the cruelty of time not so much in his own flesh as in the imperceptible changes he discerned in Fermina Daza each time he saw her.

“The only frustration I carry away from this life is that of singing at so many funerals except my own.”

That was all she said, inhibited perhaps by the resonance of her voice in the darkness, for the custom of embellishing silent films with piano accompaniment had not yet been established here, and in the darkened enclosure all that one could hear was the projector mur-muring like rain. Florentino Ariza did not think of God except in the most extreme circumstances, but now he thanked Him with all his heart. For even twenty fathoms underground he would instantly have recognized the husky voice he had carried in his soul ever since the afternoon when he heard her say in a swirl of yellow leaves in a solitary park: “Now go, and don’t come back until I tell you to.”

“Damn,” he said in the darkness. “It must be a very big fish for them to ring the Cathedral bells.”

Uncle Leo XII attended to the details of the operation as if it were being performed on his own flesh. His singular interest in false teeth had developed on one of his first trips along the Magdalena River and was the result of his maniacal love for bel canto. One night when the moon was full, at the entrance to the port of Gamarra, he made a wager with a German surveyor that he could awaken the creatures of the jungle by singing a Neapolitan romanza from the Captain’s balustrade. He almost lost the bet. In the river darkness one could hear the flapping wings of the cranes in the marshes, the thudding tails of the alligators, the terror of the shad as they tried to leap onto dry land, but on the final note, when it was feared that the singer would burst his arteries with the power of his song, his false teeth dropped out of his mouth with his last breath and fell into the water.

Bewildered by his urgency, the driver tried to raise the horse without unharnessing him, and the axle of the carriage broke. Floren-tino Ariza managed to climb out of the coach in the driving rain and endure his embarrassment until passersby in other carriages offered to take him home. While he was waiting, a servant of the Urbino family “ad seen him, his clothes soaked through, standing in mud up to his Knees, and she brought him an umbrella so that he could take refuge on the terrace. In the wildest of his deliriums Florentino Ariza had never dreamed of such good fortune, but on that afternoon he would have died rather than allow Fermina Daza to see him in that condition.

But that was only half true. Florentino Ariza based his thinking on the experience of the German commodore Johann B. Elbers, whose noble intelligence had been destroyed by excessive personal ambition. His uncle, how-ever, believed that the failure of Elbers was due not to privileges but to the unrealistic commitments he had contracted for, which had almost been tantamount to his assuming responsibility for the geogra-phy of the nation: he had taken charge of maintaining the navigability of the river, the port installations, the access routes on land, the means of transportation. Besides, he would say, the virulent opposi-tion of President Simón Bolívar was no laughing matter.

When they began their drive, Fermina Daza had covered the lower half of her face with her mantilla, not for fear of being recognized in a place where no one could know her but because of the dead bodies she saw everywhere, from the railroad station to the cemetery, bloating in the sun. The Civil and Military Commander of the city told her: “It’s cholera.” She knew it was, because she had seen the white lumps in the mouths of the sweltering corpses, but she noted that none of them had the coup de grace in the back of the neck as they had at the time of the balloon.

While she was still very young, a strong, able man whose face she never saw took her by surprise, threw her down on the jetty, ripped her clothes off, and made instantaneous and frenetic love to her. Lying there on the rocks, her body covered with cuts and bruises, she had wanted that man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms. She had not seen his face, she had not heard his voice, but she was sure she would have known him in a crowd of a thousand men because of his shape and size and his way of making love. From that time on, she would say to anyone who would listen to her: “If you ever hear of a big, strong fellow who raped a poor black girl from the street on Drowned Men’s Jetty, one October fifteenth at about half-past eleven at night, tell him where he can find me.” She said it out of habit, and she had said it to so many people that she no longer had any hope. Florentino Ariza had heard the story as many times as he had heard a boat sailing away in the night. By two o’clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was waiting for, and he was glad to know it.

The truth is that her sense of smell not only served her in regard to washing clothes or finding lost children: it was the sense that oriented her in all areas of life, above all in her social life. Juvenal Urbino had observed this throughout his marriage, in particular at the beginning, when she was the parvenu in a milieu that had been prejudiced against her for three hundred years, and yet she had made her way through coral reefs as sharp as knives, not colliding with anyone, with a power over the world that could only be a super-natural instinct. That frightening faculty, which could just as well have had its origin in a millenarian wisdom as in a heart of stone, met its moment of misfortune one ill-fated Sunday before Mass when, out of simple habit, Fermina Daza sniffed the clothing her husband had worn the evening before and experienced the disturbing sensation that she had been in bed with another man.

More than age, it was a matter of social dignity. The young men dressed like their grandfathers, they made themselves more respectable with premature spectacles, and a walking stick was looked upon with favor after the age of thirty. For women there were only two ages: the age for marrying, which did not go past twenty-two, and the age for being eternal spinsters: the ones left behind. The others, the married women, the mothers, the widows, the grandmothers, were a race apart who tallied their age not in relation to the number of years they had lived but in relation to the time left to them before they died.

If he had been forced to choose, Florentino Ariza did not know which fate he would have wanted for Fermina Daza. More than any-thing else he wanted the truth, but no matter how unbearable, and regardless of how he searched, he could not find it. It was incon-ceivable to him that no one could even give him a hint that would confirm the story he had heard. In the world of riverboats, which was his world, no mystery could be maintained, no secret could be kept. And yet no one had heard anything about the woman in the black veil. No one knew anything in a city where everything was known, and where many things were known even before they hap-pened, above all if they concerned the rich. But no one had any explanation for the disappearance of Fermina Daza. Florentino Ariza continued to patrol La Manga, continued to hear Mass without de-votion in the basilica of the seminary, continued to attend civic ceremonies that never would have interested him in another state of mind, but the passage of time only increased the credibility of the story he had heard. Everything seemed normal in the Urbino house-hold, except for the mother’s absence.

“Look at me.”

Unlike his brother, Leo XII Loayza had enjoyed a stable marriage of sixty years’ duration, and he was always proud of not working on Sundays. He had four sons and a daughter, and he wanted to prepare all of them as heirs to his empire, but by a series of coincidences that were common in the novels of the day, but that no one believed in real life, his four sons died, one after the other, as they rose to positions of authority, and his daughter had no river vocation what-soever and preferred to die watching the boats on the Hudson from a window fifty meters high. There were even those who accepted as true the tale that Florentino Ariza, with his sinister appearance and his vampire’s umbrella, had somehow been the cause of all those coincidences.

Behind him came pilgrims from remote regions, musicians playing accordions, peddlers selling food and amulets; and for three days the ranch was overflowing with the crippled and the hopeless, who in reality did not come for the learned sermons and the plenary indulgences but for the favors of the mule who, it was said, performed miracles behind his master’s back. The Bishop had frequented the home of the Urbino de la Calle family ever since his days as an ordinary priest, and one afternoon he escaped from the public festivities to have lunch at Hildebranda’s ranch. After the meal, during which they spoke on九_九_藏_书_网ly of earthly matters, he took Fermina Daza aside and asked to hear her confession. She refused in an amiable but firm manner, with the explicit argument that she had nothing to repent of. Although it was not her purpose, at least not her con-scious purpose, she was certain that her answer would reach the appropriate ears.

For the rest of the year, Fermina Daza did not attend any civic or social ceremonies, not even the Christmas celebrations, in which she and her husband had always been illustrious protagonists. But her absence was most notable on the opening night of the opera season. During intermission, Florentino Ariza happened on a group that, be-yond any doubt, was discussing her without mentioning her name. They said that one midnight the previous June someone had seen her boarding the Cunard ocean liner en route to Panama, and that she wore a dark veil to hide the ravages of the shameful disease that was con-suming her. Someone asked what terrible illness would dare to attack a woman with so much power, and the answer he received was saturated with black bile:

The peaceful suburb with its beautiful tradition of love was, however, not the most propitious for unrequited love when it became a luxury neighborhood. The streets were dusty in summer, swamp-like in winter, and desolate all year round, and the scattered houses were hidden behind leafy gardens and had mosaic tile terraces instead of old-fashioned projecting balconies, as if they had been built for the purpose of discouraging furtive lovers. It was just as well that at this time it became fashionable to drive out in the afternoon in hired old Victorias that had been converted to one-horse carriages, and that the excursion ended on a hill where one could appreciate the heart-breaking twilights of October better than from the lighthouse, and observe the watchful sharks lurking at the seminarians’ beach, and see the Thursday ocean liner, huge and white, that could almost be touched with one’s hands as it passed through the harbor channel.

For her it was the end of everything. She was sure that her honor was the subject of gossip even before her husband had finished his penance, and the feeling of humiliation that this produced in her was much less tolerable than the shame and anger and injustice caused by his infidelity. And worst of all, damn it: with a black woman. He corrected her: “With a mulatta.” But by then it was too late for accuracy: she had finished.

When he was promoted to his first important position in the R.C.C., he had clothes made to order in the same style as those of his father, whom he recalled as an old man who had died at Christ’s venerable age of thirty-three. So that Florentino Ariza always looked much older than he was. As a matter of fact, the loose-tongued Brígida Zuleta, a brief love who dished up unwashed truths, told him on the very first day that she liked him better without his clothes because he looked twenty years younger when he was naked. However, he never knew how to remedy that, first because his personal taste would not allow him to dress in any other way, and second because at the age of twenty no one knew how to dress like a younger man, unless he were to take his short pants and sailor hat out of the closet again. On the other hand, he himself could not escape the notion of old age current in his day, so it was to be expected that when he saw Fermina Daza stumble at the door of the movie theater he would be shaken by a thunderbolt of panic that death, the son of a bitch, would win an irreparable victory in his fierce war of love.

“I remember the trip very well, and what you say is accurate,” he told her, “but it happened at least five years before you were born.”

Then he realized his mistake and went to the new church, which was fashionable until just a few years ago, and there, at eight o’clock sharp on four Sundays in August, he saw Dr. Juvenal Urbino with his children, but Fermina Daza was not with them. On one of those Sundays he visited the new cemetery adjacent to the church, where the residents of La Manga were build-ing their sumptuous pantheons, and his heart skipped a beat when he discovered the most sumptuous of all in the shade of the great ceiba trees. It was already complete, with Gothic stained-glass windows and marble angels and gravestones with gold lettering for the entire family. Among them, of course, was that of Do?a Fermina Daza de Urbino de la Calle, and next to it her husband’s, with a common epitaph: Together still in the peace of the Lord.

“I am almost one hundred years old, and I have seen everything change, even the position of the stars in the universe, but I have not seen anything change yet in this country,” he would say. “Here they make new constitutions, new laws, new wars every three months, but we are still in colonial times.”

Uncle Leo XII sent him to Dr. Francis Adonay, a black giant in gaiters and jodhpurs who traveled the river boats with complete dental equipment that he carried in a steward’s saddlebag, and who seemed to be more like a traveling salesman of terror in the villages along the river. With just one glance in his mouth, he decided that Florentino Ariza had to have even his healthy teeth and molars extracted in order to protect him once and for all from further misfortunes. In contrast to baldness, this radical treatment caused him no alarm at all, except for his natural fear of a bloodbath without anesthesia. The idea of false teeth did not disturb him either, first because one of his fondest childhood memories was of a carnival magician who removed his upper and lower teeth and left them chattering by themselves on a table, and second because it would end the toothaches that had tormented him, ever since he was a boy, with almost as much cruelty as the pains of love. Unlike baldness, it did not seem to him an under-handed attack by old age, because he was convinced that despite the bitter breath of vulcanized rubber, his appearance would be cleaner with an orthopedic smile. So he submitted without resistance to the red-hot forceps of Dr. Adonay, and he endured his convalescence with the stoicism of a pack mule.

From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the cholera panic after three centuries of resistance to the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the Viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor.

Then he reached the admirable decision not to go to Miss Lynch’s house at five o’clock in the afternoon. The vows of eternal love, the dream of a discreet house for her alone where he could visit her with no unexpected interruptions, their unhurried happiness for as long as they lived--everything he had promised in the blazing heat of love was canceled forever after. The last thing Miss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box wrapped in paper from the pharmacy, so that the coachman himself thought it was an emergency prescription and handed it to her with no comment, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not even by accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bitter tears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. At five o’clock, instead of going to see her, he made a profound act of contrition before his confessor, and on the following Sunday he took Communion, his heart broken but his soul at peace.

When she disembarked with her goddaughter in San Juan de la Ciénaga, she called on the great reserves of her character and recog-nized the town despite all the evidence to the contrary. The Civil and Military Commander of the city, who had been advised of her arrival, invited her for a drive in the official Victoria while the train was preparing to leave for San Pedro Alejandrino, which she wanted to visit in order to see for herself if what they said was true, that the bed in which The Liberator had died was as small as a child’s. Then Fermina Daza saw her town again in the somnolence of two o’clock in the afternoon. She saw the streets that seemed more like beaches with scum-covered pools, and she saw the mansions of the Portu-guese, with their coats of arms carved over the entrance and bronze jalousies at the windows, where the same hesitant, sad piano exercises that her recently married mother had taught to the daughters of the wealthy houses were repeated without mercy in the gloom of the salons.

That night, at the age of forty-eight, he had the few downy strands left at his temples and the nape of his neck cut off, and he embraced with all his heart his destiny of total baldness. Every morning before his bath he lathered not only his chin but the areas on his scalp where stubble was beginning to reappear, and with a barber’s razor he left everything as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Until then he would not remove his hat even in the office, for his baldness produced a sensation of nakedness that seemed indecent to him. But when he accepted his baldness with all his heart, he attributed to it the masculine virtues that he had heard about and scorned as nothing but the fantasies of bald men. Later he took refuge in the new custom of combing long hairs from his part on the right all the way across his head, and this he never abandoned. But even so, he continued to wear his hat, always the same funereal style, even after the tartarita, the local name for the straw skimmer, came into fashion.

América Vicu?a, completely naked, had just awakened.

Since he was the only person authorized to take her out of the boarding school, he would call for her in the six-cylinder Hudson that belonged to the R.C.C., and sometimes they would lower the top if the afternoon ,was not sunny and drive along the beach, he with his somber hat and she, weak with laughter, holding the sailor hat of her school uniform with both hands so that the wind would not blow it off. Someone had told her not to spend more time with her guardian than necessary, not to eat anything he had tasted, and not to put her face too close to his, for old age was contagious. But she did not care. They were both indifferent to what people might think of them because their family kinship was well known, and what is more, the extreme difference in their ages placed them beyond all suspicion.

“I have not stopped thinking about you for an instant,” he said.

The meeting frightened away sleep. Instead of driving Leona Cassiani in the carriage, he walked with her through the old city, where their footsteps echoed like horses’ hooves on the cobblestones. From time to time, fragments of fugitive voices escaped through the open balconies, bedroom confidences, sobs of love magnified by phantasmal acoustics and the hot fragrance of jasmine in the narrow, sleeping streets. Once again Florentino Ariza had to summon all his strength not to reveal to Leona Cassiani his repressed love for Fermina Daza.

It was for-tunate that after so much governmental instability because of so many superimposed civil wars, academic standards were less selective than they had been, and there was a jumble of backgrounds and social positions in the public schools. Half-grown children would come to class from the barricades, smelling of gunpowder, wearing the in-signias and uniforms of rebel officers captured at gunpoint in incon-clusive battles, and carrying their regulation weapons in full view at their waists. They shot each other over disagreements in the play-ground, they threatened the teachers if they received low grades on examinations, and one of them, a third-year student at La Salle Academy and a retired colonel in the militia, shot and killed Brother Juan Eremita, Prefect of the Community, because he said in catechism class that God was a full-fledged member of the Conservative Party.

The Reverend Lynch did not lead a regular life, for he would ride away on his mule on the spur of the moment, carrying Bibles and evangelical pamphlets on one side and provisions on the other, and he would return when least expected. Another difficulty was the school across the street, for the children would recite their lessons as they looked out the windows, and what they saw with greatest clarity was the house across the way, with its doors and windows open wide from six o’clock in the morning, they saw Miss Lynch hanging the birdcage from the eaves so that the troupial could learn the recited lessons, they saw her wearing a bright-colored turban and going about her household tasks as she recited along with them in her brilliant Caribbean voice, and later they saw her sitting on the porch, reciting the afternoon psalms by herself in English.

“That is true,” said the officer. “Even God improves His methods.”

“That would be best,” she said. “Then we could both have some peace.”

Not even Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with all his prestige, could persuade them to move it where it would not disturb anyone, until his proven complicity with Divine Providence inter-ceded on his behalf. One night the boiler in the plant blew up in a fearful explosion, flew over the new houses, sailed across half the city, and destroyed the largest gallery in the former convent of St. Julian the Hospitaler. The old ruined building had been abandoned at the beginning of the year, but the boiler caused the deaths of four prisoners who had escaped from the local jail earlier that night and were hiding in the chapel.

For her sake Florentino Ariza had violated his sacred principle of never paying, and she had violated hers of never doing it free of charge, even with her husband. They had agreed upon a symbolic fee of one peso, which she did not take and he did not hand to her, but which they put in the piggy bank until enough of them had accumulated to buy something charming from overseas in the Arcade of the Scribes. It was she who attributed a distinctive sensuality to the enemas he used for his crises of constipa-tion, who convinced him to share them with her, and they took them together in the course of their mad afternoons as they tried to create even more love within their love.

It was not the only thing that came to an end that night. The evil lie about the pavilion of consumptives had ruined his sleep, for it had instilled in him the inconceivable idea that Fermina Daza was mortal and as a consequence might die before her husband. But when he saw her stumble at the door of the movie theater, by his own volition he took another step toward the abyss with the sudden realization that he, and not she, might be the one to die first. It was the most fearful kind of presentiment, because it was based on reality.

Florentino Ariza was in no way expert in matters pertaining to the Church, and he had not gone to Mass again since he had played the violin in the choir with a German who also taught him the science of the telegraph and about whose fate he had never been able to obtain any definite news. But he knew beyond any doubt that the bells were not ringing for Pentecost. There was public mourning in the city, that was certain, and that is what he knew. A delegation of Caribbean refugees had come to his house that morning to inform him that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had been found dead in his photography studio. Although Florentino Ariza was not an intimate friend of his, he was close to many other refugees who always invited him to their public ceremonies, above all to their funerals. But he was sure that the bells were not tolling for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, who was a militant unbeliever and a committed anarchist and who had, more-over, died by his own hand.

They flew over the dark ocean of the banana plantations, whose silence reached them like a lethal vapor, and Fermina Daza remem-bered herself at the age of three, perhaps four, walking through the shadowy forest holding the hand of her mother, who was almost a girl herself, surrounded by other women dressed in muslin, just like her mother, with white parasols and hats made of gauze. The pilot, who was observing the world through a spyglass, said: “They seem dead.” He passed the spyglass to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who saw the oxcarts in the cultivated fields, the boundary lines of the railroad tracks, the blighted irrigation ditches, and wherever he looked he saw human bodies. Someone said that the cholera was ravaging the villages of the Great Swamp. Dr. Urbino, as he spoke, continued to look through the spyglass.

“I know since I saw you in hospital, Doctor,” she said. “Black I am but not a fool.”

“Bravo, lionlady,” he said when he left. “We have killed the tiger.”

He considered it a stroke of good fortune that among so many hazardous encounters, the only woman who had made him taste a drop of bitterness was the sinuous Sara Noriega, who ended her days in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum, reciting senile verses of such outrageous obscenity that they were forced to isolate her so that she would not drive the rest of the madwomen crazy. However, when he took over complete responsibility for the R.C.C., he no longer had much time or desire to attempt to replace Fermina Daza with anyone else: he knew that she was irreplaceable. Little by little he had fallen into the routine of visiting the ones who were already established, sleeping with them for as long as they pleased him, for as long as he could, for as long as they lived. On the Pentecost Sunday when Juvenal Urbino died, he had only one left, only one, who had just turned fourteen and had everything that no one else until then had had to make him mad with love.

América Vicu?a, her pale body dappled by the light coming in through the carelessly drawn blinds, was not of an age to think about death. They had made love after lunch and they were lying together at the end of their siesta, both of them naked under the ceiling fan, whose humming could not hide the sound like falling hail that the buzzards made as they walked across the hot tin roof. Florentino Ariza loved her as he had loved so many other casual women in his long life, but he loved her with more anguish than any other, because he was certain he would be dead by the time she finished secondary school.

That night, on the other hand, she wished him dead with all her heart, and this certainty alarmed him. Then he heard her slow sobbing in the darkness as she bit the pillow so he would not hear. He was puzzled, because he knew that she did not cry easily for any affliction of body or soul. She cried only in rage, above all if it had its origins in her terror of culpability, and then the more she cried the more enraged she became, because she could never forgive her weakness in crying. He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run through by a spear, and he did not have the courage to tell her that the reason for her weeping had disappeared that afternoon, had been pulled out by the roots, forever, even from his memory.

Almost two years after the disappearance of Fermina Daza, an impossible coincidence occurred, the sort that Tránsito Ariza would have characterized as one of God’s jokes. Florentino Ariza had not been impressed in any special way by the invention of moving pic-tures, but Leona Cassiani took him, unresisting, to the spectacular opening of Cabiria, whose reputation was based on the dialogues written by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. The great open-air patio of Don Galileo Daconte, where on some nights one enjoyed the splendor of the stars more than the silent lovemaking on the screen, was filled to overflowing with a select public. Leona Cassiani fol-lowed the wandering plot with her heart in her mouth. Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, was nodding his head in sleep because of the overwhelming tedium of the drama. At his back, a woman’s voice seemed to read his thoughts:

He remembered other widows he had loved. He remembered Prudencia Pitre, the oldest of those still alive, who was known to everyone as the Widow of Two because she had outlived both her husbands. And the other Prudencia, the Widow Arellano, the amo-rous one, who would rip the buttons from his clothes so that he would have to stay in her house while she sewed them back on. And Josefa, the Widow Zú?iga, mad with love for him, who was ready to cut off his penis with gardening shears while he slept, so that he would belong to no one else even if he could not belong to her.

“Behave yourself,” she said. “I realized a long time ago that you are not the man I am looking for.”

“I have a right to know who she is,” she said.

“Well, it must be a very special form of cholera,” he said, “because every single corpse has received the coup de grace through the back of the neck.”

After that night, and after similar episodes that occurred during that time, when Fermina Daza could not tell for certain where reality ended and where illusion began, she had the overwhelming revelation that she was losing her mind. At last she realized that her husband had not taken Communion on the Thursday of Corpus Christi or on any Sunday in recent weeks, and he had

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not found time for that year’s retreats. When she asked him the reason for those unusual changes in his spiritual health, she received an evasive answer. This was the decisive clue, because he had not failed to take Communion on an important feast day since he had made his first Communion, at the age of eight. In this way she realized not only that her husband was in a state of mortal sin but that he had resolved to persist in it, since he did not go to his confessor for help. She had never imagined that she could suffer so much for something that seemed to be the absolute opposite of love, but she was suffering, and she resolved that the only way she could keep from dying was to burn out the nest of vipers that was poisoning her soul. And that is what she did. One afternoon she began to darn socks on the terrace while her husband was reading, as he did every day after his siesta. Suddenly she interrupted her work, pushed her eyeglasses up onto her forehead, and without any trace of harshness, she asked for an explanation:

It never did, for Fermina Daza was alive and well on the ranch, half a league from the village of Flores de María, where her Cousin Hildebranda Sánchez was living, forgotten by the world. She had left with no scandal, by mutual agreement with her husband, both of them as entangled as adolescents in the only serious crisis they had suffered during so many years of stable matrimony. It had taken them by surprise in the repose of their maturity, when they felt themselves safe from misfortune’s sneak attacks, their children grown and well-behaved, and the future ready for them to learn how to be old without bitterness. It had been something so unexpected for them both that they wanted to resolve it not with shouts, tears, and intermediaries, as was the custom in the Caribbean, but with the wisdom of the nations of Europe, and there was so much vacillation as to whether their loyalties lay here or over there that they ended up mired in a puerile situation that did not belong anywhere. At last she decided to leave, not even knowing why or to what purpose, out of sheer fury, and he, inhibited by his sense of guilt, had not been able to dissuade her.

Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, faced the insidious snares of old age with savage temerity, even though he knew that his peculiar fate had been to look like an old man from the time he was a boy. At first it was a matter of necessity. Tránsito Ariza pulled apart and then sewed together again for him the clothes that his father decided to discard, so that he went to primary school wearing frock coats that dragged on the ground when he sat down, and ministerial hats that came down over his ears despite the cotton batting on the inside to make them smaller. Since he had also worn glasses for myopia from the age of five, and had his mother’s Indian hair, as bristly and coarse as horsehair, his appearance clarified nothing.

However, it was not her memory alone that accompanied him to the party Leona Cassiani gave for him that night. The memory of them all was with him: those who slept in the cemeteries, thinking of him through the roses he planted over them, as well as those who still laid their heads on the pillow where their husbands slept, their horns golden in the moonlight. Deprived of one, he wanted to be with them all at the same time, which is what he always wanted whenever he was fearful. For even during his most difficult times and at his worst moments, he had maintained some link, no matter how weak, with his countless lovers of so many years: he always kept track of their lives.

Holding his breath, Florentino Ariza observed her at his pleasure: he saw her eat, he saw her hardly touch her wine, he saw her joke with the fourth in the line of Don Sanchos; from his solitary table he shared a moment of her life, and for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, in the forbidden precincts of her intimacy. Then he drank four more cups of coffee to pass the time until he saw her leave with the rest of the group. They passed so close to him that he could distinguish her scent among the clouds of other perfumes worn by her companions.

Three days later the members of the balloon expedition, devas-tated by a bad night of storms, returned to their port of origin, where they received a heroes’ welcome. Lost in the crowd, of course, was Florentino Ariza, who recognized the traces of terror on Fermina Daza’s face. Nevertheless he saw her again that same afternoon in a cycling exhibition that was also sponsored by her husband, and she showed no sign of fatigue. She rode an uncommon velocipede that resembled something from a circus, with a very high front wheel, over which she was seated, and a very small back wheel that gave almost no support. She wore a pair of loose trousers trimmed in red, which scandalized the older ladies and disconcerted the gentlemen, but no one was indifferent to her skill.

“Not here, please,” he shouted. “Anywhere but here.”

“In my opinion,” he said, “the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us.”

They worked at the oddest hours, with an impertinence that did not seem unintentional, and they offered the same response to all his protests: “Orders from the head office.” Florentino Ariza never knew if this sort of interference was a kindness on his uncle’s part or a very personal way of forcing him to face up to his abusive behavior. The truth never occurred to him, which was that Uncle Leo XII was encouraging his nephew, because he, too, had heard the rumors that his habits were different from those of most men, and this obstacle to naming him as his successor had caused him great distress.

They walked together with measured steps, loving each other like unhurried old sweethearts, she thinking about the charms of Cabiria and he thinking about his own misfortune. A man was singing on a balcony in the Plaza of the Customhouse, and his song was re-peated throughout the area in a chain of echoes: When I was sailing across the immense waves of the sea. On Saints of Stone Street, just when he should have said good night at her door, Florentino Ariza asked Leona Cassiani to invite him in for a brandy. It was the second time he had made such a request to her under comparable circum-stances. The first time, ten years before, she had said to him: “If you come in at this hour you will have to stay forever.” He did not go in. But he would do so now, even if he had to break his word afterward. Nevertheless, Leona Cassiani invited him in and asked for no promises.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino made the decision to come for her after receiving a report from the Bishop of Riohacha, who had concluded that his wife’s long stay was caused not by her unwillingness to return but by her inability to find a way around her pride. So he went without notifying her after an exchange of letters with Hildebranda, in which it was made clear that his wife was filled with nostalgia: now she thought only of home. At eleven o’clock in the morning, Fermina Daza was in the kitchen preparing stuffed eggplant when she heard the shouts of the peons, the neighing of the horses, the shooting of guns into the air, then the resolute steps in the courtyard and the man’s voice:

A short while later they flew over a foaming sea, and they landed without incident on a broad, hot beach whose surface, cracked with niter burned like fire. The officials were there with no more protec-tion against the sun than ordinary umbrellas, the elementary schools were there waving little flags in time to the music, and the beauty queens with scorched flowers and crowns made of gold cardboard, and the brass band of the prosperous town of Gayra, which in those days was the best along the Caribbean coast. All that Fermina Daza wanted was to see her birthplace again, to confront it with her earliest memories, but no one was allowed to go there because of the dangers of the plague. Dr. Juvenal Urbino delivered the historic letter, which was then mislaid among other papers and never seen again, and the entire delegation almost suffocated in the tedium of the speeches. The pilot could not make the balloon ascend again, and at last they were led on muleback to the dock at Pueblo Viejo, where the swamp met the sea. Fermina Daza was sure she had passed through there with her mother when she was very young, in a cart drawn by a team of oxen. When she was older, she had repeated the story several times to her father, who died insisting that she could not possibly recall that.

Her name was América Vicu?a. She had arrived two years before from the fishing village of Puerto Padre, entrusted by her family to Florentino Ariza as her guardian and recognized blood relative. They had sent her with a government scholarship to study secondary education, with her petate and her little tin trunk as small as a doll’s, and from the moment she walked off the boat, with her high white shoes and her golden braid, he had the awful presentiment that they were going to take many Sunday siestas together. She was still a child in every sense of the word, with braces on her teeth and the scrapes of elementary school on her knees, but he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year of Saturdays at the circus, Sundays in the park with ice cream, childish late afternoons, and he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse. For her it was immediate: the doors of heaven opened to her. All at once she burst into flower, which left her floating in a limbo of happiness and which motivated her studies, for she was always at the head of her class so that she would not lose the privilege of going out on weekends. For him it was the most sheltered inlet in the cove of his old age. After so many years of calculated loves, the mild pleasure of inno-cence had the charm of a restorative perversion.

“This is the first time since I know you that I have heard you say something you should not have,” he said. “Well, then: I will assume it was never said.”

Florentino Ariza knew that the wealthy of his country did not contract short-term diseases. Either they died without warning, almost always on the eve of a major holiday that could not be celebrated because of the period of mourning, or they faded away in long, abominable illnesses whose most intimate details eventually became public knowledge. Seclusion in Panama was almost an obligatory penance in the life of the rich. They submitted to God’s will in the Adventist Hospital, an immense white warehouse lost in the pre-historic downpours of Darién, where the sick lost track of the little life that was left to them, and in whose solitary rooms with their burlap windows no one could tell with certainty if the smell of carbolic acid was the odor of health or of death.

In the past few years he had become conscious of the burden of his own body. He recognized the symptoms. He had read about them in textbooks, he had seen them confirmed in real life, in older patients with no history of serious ailments who suddenly began to describe perfect syndromes that seemed to come straight from medical texts and yet turned out to be imaginary. His professor of children’s clinical medicine at La Salpêtrière had recommended pediatrics as the most honest specialization, because children become sick only when in fact they are sick, and they cannot communicate with the physician using conventional words but only with concrete symptoms of real diseases. After a certain age, however, adults either had the symptoms without the diseases or, what was worse, serious diseases with the symptoms of minor ones. He distracted them with palliatives, giving time enough time to teach them not to feel their ailments, so that they could live with them in the rubbish heap of old age. Dr. Juvenal Urbino never thought that a physician his age, who believed he had seen everything, would not be able to overcome the uneasy feeling that he was ill when he was not. Or what was worse, not believe he was, out of pure scientific prejudice, when perhaps he really was. At the age of forty, half in earnest and half in jest, he had said in class: “All I need in life is someone who understands me.” But when he found himself lost in the labyrinth of Miss Lynch, he no longer was jesting.

The truth is that by the standards of his time, Florentino Ariza had crossed the line into old age. He was fifty-six well-preserved years old, and he thought them well lived because they were years of love. But no man of the time would have braved the ridicule of looking young at his age, even if he did or thought he did, and none would have dared to confess without shame that he still wept in secret over a rebuff received in the previous century. It was a bad time for being young: there was a style of dress for each age, but the style of old age began soon after adolescence, and lasted until the grave.

To his brother Masons, who attributed all evils to the failure of federalism, he would always reply: “The War of a Thousand Days was lost twenty-three years ago in the war of ’76.” Florentino Ariza, whose indifference to politics hovered on the limits of the absolute, listened to these increasingly frequent and tiresome speeches as one listens to the sound of the sea. But he was a rigorous debater when it came to company policy. In opposition to his uncle’s opinion, he thought that the setbacks in river navigation, always on the edge of disaster, could be remedied only by a voluntary renunciation of the riverboat monopoly that the National Congress had granted to the River Company of the Caribbean for ninety-nine years and a day. His uncle protested: “My namesake Leona with her worthless an-archist theories has put those ideas in your head.”

Another visitor, however, who seemed very well informed, said that the bed was a false relic, for the truth was that the father of his country had been left to die on the floor. Fermina Daza was so depressed by what she had seen and heard since she left her house that for the rest of the trip she took no pleasure in the memory of her earlier trip, as she had longed to do, but in-stead she avoided passing through the villages of her nostalgia. In this way she could still keep them, and keep herself from disillusion-ment. She heard the accordions in her detours around disenchantment, she heard the shouts from the cockfighting pits, the bursts of gunfire that could just as well signal war as revelry, and when she had no other recourse and had to pass through a village, she covered her face with her mantilla so that she could remember it as it once had been.

The mere idea excited his youthful desires. Once again he haunted Fermina Daza’s villa, filled with the same longings he had felt when he was on duty in the little Park of the Evangels, but his calculated intention was not that she see him, but rather that he see her and know that she was still in the world. Now, however, it was difficult for him to escape notice. The District of La Manga was on a semi-deserted island, separated from the historic city by a canal of green water and covered by thickets of icaco plum, which had sheltered Sunday lovers in colonial times. In recent years, the old stone bridge built by the Spaniards had been torn down, and in its stead was one made of brick and lined with streetlamps for the new mule-drawn trolleys. At first the residents of La Manga had to endure a torture that had not been anticipated during construction, which was sleeping so close to the city’s first electrical plant whose vibration was a constant earthquake.

When he saw Fermina Daza she was almost always on her husband’s arm, the two of them in perfect harmony, moving through their own space with the astonishing fluidity of Siamese cats, which was broken only when they stopped to greet him. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in fact, shook his hand with warm cordiality, and on occa-sion even permitted himself a pat on the shoulder. She, on the other hand, kept him relegated to an impersonal regime of formalities and never made the slightest gesture that might allow him to suspect that she remembered him from her unmarried days. They lived in two different worlds, but while he made every effort to reduce the distance between them, every step she took was in the opposite direction. It was a long time before he dared to think that her in-difference was no more than a shield for her timidity. This occurred to him suddenly, at the christening of the first freshwater vessel built in the local shipyards, which was also the first official occasion at which Florentino Ariza, as First Vice President of the R.C.C., repre-sented Uncle Leo XII. This coincidence imbued the ceremony with special solemnity, and everyone of any significance in the life of the city was present.

But her habit of sniffing at all the clothing she hap-pened across seemed to him not only inappropriate but unhealthy as well. She took it as a joke, which is what she did with everything she did not care to discuss, and she said that God had not put that diligent oriole’s beak on her face just for decoration. One morning, while she was at the market, the servants aroused the entire neighbor-hood in their search for her three-year-old son, who was not to be found anywhere in the house. She arrived in the middle of the panic, turned around two or three times like a tracking mastiff, and found the boy asleep in an armoire where no one thought he could possibly be hiding. When her astonished husband asked her how she had found him, she replied:

Urged on by her imagination, she began to discover changes in her husband. She found him evasive, without appetite at the table or in bed, prone to exasperation and ironic answers, and when he was at home he was no longer the tranquil man he had once been but a caged lion. For the first time since their marriage, she began to monitor the times he was late, to keep track of them to the minute, to tell him lies in order to learn the truth, but then she felt wounded to the quick by the contradictions. One night she awoke with a start, terrified by a vision of her husband staring at her in the darkness with eyes that seemed full of hatred. She had suffered a similar fright in her youth, when she had seen Florentino Ariza at the foot of her bed, but that apparition had been full of love, not hate. Besides, this time it was not fantasy: her husband was awake at two in the morning, sitting up in bed to watch her while she slept, but when she asked him why, he denied it. He lay back on the pillow and said:

For this occurred after she interrupted his afternoon reading to ask him to look at her, and he had the first indication that his hellish circle had been discovered. But he did not know how, because it would have been impossible for him to conceive of Fermina Daza’s learning the truth by smell alone. In any case, for a long time this had not been a good city for keeping secrets. Soon after the first home telephones were installed, several marriages that seemed stable were destroyed by anonymous tale-bearing calls, and a number of frightened families either canceled their service or refused to have a telephone for many years. Dr. Urbino knew that his wife had too much self-respect to allow so much as an attempt at anonymous betrayal by telephone, and he could not imagine anyone daring to try it under his own name. But he feared the old method: a note slipped under the door by an unknown hand could be effective, not only because it guaranteed the double anonymity of sender and receiver, but be-cause its time-honored ancestry permitted one to attribute to it some kind of metaphysical connection to the designs of Divine Providence.

A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men on charity, whisper-ing in their ear, in order not to wound their masculine pride, that they should be careful, that there were three steps, not two, that there was a puddle in the middle of the street, that the shape lying across the sidewalk was a dead beggar, and with great difficulty helped them to cross the street as if it were the only ford across the last of life’s rivers. Florentino Ariza had seen himself reflected so often in that mirror that he was never as afraid of death as he was of reaching that humiliating age when he would have to be led on a woman’s arm. On that day, and only on that day, he knew he would have to renounce his hope of Fermina Daza.

However, she was going to learn very soon that her drastic de-cision was not so much the fruit of resentment as of nostalgia. After their honeymoon she had returned several times to Europe, despite the ten days at sea, and she had always made the trip with more than enough time to enjoy it. She knew the world, she had learned to live and think in new ways, but she had never gone back to San Juan de la Ciénaga after the aborted flight in the balloon. To her mind there was an element of redemption in the return to Cousin Hildebranda’s province, no matter how belated. This was not her response to her marital catastrophe: the idea was much older than that. So the mere thought of revisiting her adolescent haunts con-soled her in her unhappiness.

The room resembled a ship’s cabin, its walls made of wooden laths covered by many coats of paint, as were the walls of boats, but at four o’clock in the afternoon, even with the electric fan hanging over the bed, the heat was more intense than in the riverboat cabins be-cause it reflected off the metal roof. It was not so much a formal bedroom as a cabin on dry land, which Florentino Ariza had built behind his office in the R.C.C. with no other purpose or pretext than to have a nice little refuge for his old man’s loves. On ordinary days it was difficult to sleep there, with the shouts of the stevedores, and the noise of the cranes from the river harbor, and the enormous bel-lowing of the ships moored at the dock. For the girl, however, it was a Sunday paradise.

All that Florentino Ariza had done since Fermina Daza’s marriage had been based on his hope for this event. But now that it had come, he did not feel the thrill of triumph he had imagined so often in his sleeplessness. Instead, he was seized by terror: the fantastic realiza-tion that it could just as well have been himself for whom the death knell was tolling. Sitting beside him in the automobile that jolted along the cobbled streets, América Vicu?a was frightened by his pallor, and she asked him what was the matter. Florentino Ariza grasped her hand with his icy one.

Six months later, by unanimous agreement, Florentino Ariza was named President of the Board of Directors and General Manager of the company. After the champagne toast on the day he took over the post, the old lion in retirement excused himself for speaking without getting up from the rocker, and he improvised a brief speech that seemed more like an elegy. He said that his life had begun and ended with two providential events. The first was that The Liberator had carried him in his arms in the village of Turbaco when he was making his ill-fated journey toward death. The other had been finding, despite all the obstacles that destiny had interposed, a suc-cessor worthy of the company. At last, trying to undramatize the drama, he concluded:

“And you, Se?orita, feel free to carry on. I swear by my honor that I have not seen your face.”

By then Florentino Ariza had cut out every advertisement con-cerning baldness that he found in the newspapers of the Caribbean basin, the ones in which they printed two pictures of the same man, first as bald as a melon and then with more hair than a lion: before and after using the infallible cure. After six years he had tried one hundred seventy-two of them, in addition to complementary treat-ments that appeared on the labels of the bottles, and all that he achieved was an itching, foul-smelling eczema of the scalp called ringworm borealis by the medicine men of Martinique because it emitted a phosphorescent glow in the dark. As a last resort he had recourse to all the herbs that the Indians hawked in the public market and to all the magical specifics and Oriental potions sold in the Arcade of the Scribes, but by the time he realized that he had been swindled, he already had the tonsure of a saint.

“My God, this is longer than sorrow!”

“A lady so distinguished could suffer only from consumption.”

That night, following his renunciation, as he was undressing for bed, he recited for Fermina Daza the bitter litany of his early morn-ing insomnia, his sudden stabbing pains, his desire to weep in the afternoon, the encoded symptoms of secret love, which he recounted as if they were the miseries of old age. He had to tell someone or die, or else tell the truth, and so the relief he obtained was sanctified within the domestic rituals of love. She listened to him with close attention, but without looking at him, without saying anything as she picked up every article of clothing he removed, sniffed it with no gesture or change of expression that might betray her wrath, then crumpled it and tossed it into the wicker basket for dirty clothes. She did not find the odor, but it was all the same: tomorrow was another day. Before he knelt down to pray before the altar in the bedroom, he ended the recital of his misery with a sigh as mournful as it was sincere: “I think I am going to die.” She did not even blink when she replied.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino had met her four months earlier as she waited her turn in the clinic of Misericordia Hospital, and he knew im-mediately that something irreparable had just occurred in his destiny. She was a tall, elegant, large-boned mulatta, with skin the color and softness of molasses, and that morning she wore a red dress with white polka dots and a broad-brimmed hat of the same fabric, which shaded her face down to her eyelids. Her sex seemed more pronounced than that of other human beings. Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not attend patients in the clinic, but whenever he passed by and had time to spare, he would go in to remind his more advanced students that there is no medicine better than a good diagnosis. So that he arranged to be present at the examination of the unforeseen mulatta, making certain that his pupils would not notice any gesture of his that did not appear to be casual and barely looking at her, but fixing her name and address with care in his memory. That afternoon, after his last house call, he had his carriage pass by the address that she had given in the consulting room, and in fact there she was, enjoying the coolness on her terrace.

“It’s for that doctor with the goatee,” said the driver. “What’s his name?”

“By the smell of caca.”

Florentino Ariza was very sensitive to the faltering steps of age. Even as a young man he would interrupt his reading of poetry in the park to observe elderly couples who helped each other across the street, and they were lessons in life that had aided him in detecting the laws of his own aging. At Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s time of life, that night at the film, men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty and seductive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows.

Lost in the guileless crowd that sang the national anthem as the balloon gained altitude, Florentino Ariza felt himself in agreement with the person whose comments he heard over the din, to the effect that this was not a suitable exploit for a woman, least of all one as old as Fermina Daza. But it was not so dangerous after all. Or at least not so much dangerous as depressing. The balloon reached its destination without incident after a peaceful trip through an incredible blue sky. They flew well and very low, with a calm, favorable wind, first along the spurs of the snow-covered mountains and then over the vastness of the Great Swamp.

The matter was not mentioned again, but the following week it was impossible to work in Florentino Ariza’s office. On Monday the electricians burst in to install a rotating fan on the ceiling. The locksmiths arrived unannounced and with as much noise as if they were going to war, installed a lock on the door so that it could be bolted from the inside. The carpenters took measurements without saying why, the upholsterers brought swatches of cretonne to see if they matched the color of the walls, and the next week an enormous double couch covered in a Dionysian flowered print was delivered through the window because it was too big for the doors.

He remembered the Widow Nazaret, the only one with whom he had profaned his mother’s house on the Street of Windows, al-though it had been Tránsito Ariza and not he who had asked her in. He was more understanding of her than of any of the others, because she was the only one who radiated enough tenderness to compensate for Fermina Daza despite her sluggishness in bed. But she had the inclinations of an alleycat, which were more indomitable than the strength of her tenderness, and this meant that both of them were condemned to infidelity. Still, they continued to be intermittent lovers for almost thirty years, thanks to their musketeers’ motto: Unfaithful but not disloyal. She was also the only one for whom Florentino Ariza assumed any responsibility: when he heard that she had died and was going to a pauper’s grave, he buried her at his own expense and was the only mourner at the funeral.

Fermina Daza did not know where to locate the odor of his clothing in her husband’s routine. It could not be placed between his morning class and lunch, for she supposed that no woman in her right mind would make hurried love at that time of day, least of all with a visitor, when the house still had to be cleaned, and the beds made, and the marketing done, and lunch prepared, and perhaps with the added worry that one of the children would be sent home early from school because somebody threw a stone at him and hurt his head and he would find her at eleven o’clock in the morning, naked in the unmade bed and, to make matters worse, with a doctor on top of her. She also knew that Dr. Juvenal Urbino made love only at night, better yet in absolute darkness, and as a last resort before breakfast when the first birds began to chirp.

She was another person. There was no sign in her face of the terrible disease that was in fashion, or of any other illness, and her body had kept the proportion and slenderness of her better days, but it was evident that the last two years had been as hard on her as ten difficult ones. Her short hair was becoming, with a curved wing on each cheek, but it was the color of aluminum, not honey, and behind her grandmother’s spectacles her beautiful lanceolate eyes had lost half a lifetime of light. Florentino Ariza saw her move away from her husband’s arm in the crowd that was leaving the theater, and he was surprised that she was in a public place wearing a poor woman’s mantilla and house slippers. But what moved him most was that her husband had to take her arm to help her at the exit, and even then she miscalculated the height of the step and almost tripped on the stairs at the door.

Those who recovered came back bearing splendid gifts that they would distribute with a free hand and a kind of agonized longing to be pardoned for their indiscretion in still being alive. Some returned with their abdomens crisscrossed by barbarous stitches that seemed to have been sewn with cobbler’s hemp; they would raise their shirts to display them when people came to visit, they compared them with those of others who had suffocated from excesses of joy, and for the rest of their days they would describe and describe again the angelic visions they had seen under the influence of chloroform. On the other hand, no one ever learned about the visions of those who did not return, including the saddest of them all: those who had died as exiles in the tuberculosis pavilion, more from the sadness of the rain than because of the complications of their disease.

“No,” he said, “tolling like that must be for a governor at least.”

He was as drenched by perspiration as if he had just stepped out of a pool wearing all his clothes, and he dried his hands and face with a towel.

That was how he found himself, when he least expected it, in the sanctuary of a love that had been extinguished before it was born. Her parents had died, her only brother had made his fortune in Cura?ao, and she was living alone in the old family house. Years before, when he had still not renounced the hope of making her his lover, with the consent of her parents Florentino Ariza would visit her on Sundays, and sometimes until very late at night, and he had contributed so much to the household that he came to consider it his own. But that night after the film he had the feeling that his memory had been erased from the drawing room. The furniture had been moved, there were new prints hanging on the walls, and he thought that so many heartless changes had been made in order to perpetuate the certainty that he had never lived. The cat did not recognize him. Dismayed by the cruelty of oblivion, he said: “He does not remember me anymore.” But she replied over her shoulder, as she was fixing the brandies, that if he was bothered by that he could rest easy, because cats do not remember anyone.

For the next two weeks he did not sleep through a single night. He asked himself in despair where Fermina Daza could be without him, what she could be thinking, what she would do, in the years of life remaining to her, with the burden of consternation he had left in her hands. He suffered a crisis of constipation that swelled his belly like a drum, and he had to resort to remedies less pleasant than enemas. The complaints of old age, which he endured better than his con-temporaries because he had known them since his youth, all attacked at the same time. On Wednesday he appeared at the office after a week at home, and Leona Cassiani was horrified at seeing him so pale and enervated.

She saw the deserted plaza, with no trees growing in the burning lumps of sodium nitrate, the line of carriages with their funereal tops and their horses asleep where they stood, the yellow train to San Pedro Alejandrino, and on the corner next to the largest church she saw the biggest and most beautiful of the houses, with an arcaded passageway of greenish stone, and its great monastery door, and the window of the bedroom where álvaro would be born many years later when she no longer had the memory to remember it. She thought of Aunt Escolástica, for whom she continued her hopeless search in heaven and on earth, and thinking of her, she found herself thinking of Florentino Ariza with his literary clothes and his book of poems under the almond trees in the little park, as she did on rare occasions when she recalled her unpleasant days at the Academy. She drove around and around, but she could not recog-nize the old family house, for where she supposed it to be she found only a pigsty, and around the corner was a street lined with brothels where whores from all over the world took their siestas in the doorways in case there was something for them in the mail. It was not the same town.

Jealousy was unknown in his house: during more than thirty years of conjugal peace, Dr. Urbino had often boasted in public--and until now it had been true--that he was like those Swedish matches that light only with their own box. But he did not know how a woman with as much pride, dignity, and strength of character as his wife would react in the face of proven infidelity. So that after looking at her as she had asked, nothing occurred to him but to lower his eyes again in order to hide his embarrassment and continue the pretense of being lost among the sweet, meandering rivers of Alca Island until he could think of something else. Fermina Daza, for her part, said nothing more either. When she finished darning the socks, she tossed everything into the sewing basket in no par-ticular order, gave instructions in the kitchen for supper, and went to the bedroom.

He knew that she was sitting in the seat behind his, next to her inevitable husband, and he could detect her warm, even breathing, and he inhaled with love the air purified by the health of her breath. Instead of imagining her under attack by the devouring worms of death, as he had in his despondency of recent months, he recalled her at a radiant and joyful age, her belly rounded under the Minervan tunic with the seed of her first child. In utter detachment from the historical disasters that were crowding the screen, he did not need to turn around to see her in his imagination. He delighted in the scent of almonds that came wafting back to him from his innermost being, and he longed to know how she thought women in films should fall in love so that their loves would cause less pain than they did in life. Just before the film ended, he realized in a flash of exultation that he had never been so close, so long, to the one he loved so much.

“I thought this not permitted by your ethics.”

“You know better than I,” she said.

Florentino Ariza did not have to wonder who that was. Never-theless, when the driver told him how he had died, his instantaneous hope vanished because he could not believe what he heard. Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies, and no death could resemble the man he was thinking about less than this one. But it was he, although it seemed absurd: the oldest and best-qualified doc-tor in the city, and one of its illustrious men for many other meritori-ous reasons, had died of a broken spine, at the age of eighty-one, when he fell from the branch of a mango tree as he tried to catch a parrot.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino came ten minutes early for the Saturday appointment, and Miss Lynch had not finished dressing to receive him. He had not felt so much tension since his days in Paris when he had to present himself for an oral examination. As she lay on her canvas bed, wearing a thin silk slip, Miss Lynch’s beauty was endless. Everything about her was large and intense: her siren’s thighs, her slow-burning skin, her astonished breasts, her diaphanous gums with their perfect teeth, her whole body radiating a vapor of good health that was the human odor Fermina Daza had discovered in her hus-band’s clothing. She had gone to the clinic because she suffered from something that she, with much charm, called “twisted colons,” and Dr. Urbino thought that it was a symptom that should not be ignored.

They had to choose a time when the children were not there, and there were only two possibilities: the afternoon recess for lunch, between twelve and two, which was also when the Doctor had his lunch, or late in the afternoon, after the children had gone home. This was always the best time, although by then the Doctor had made his rounds and had only a few minutes to spare before it was time for him to eat with his family. The third problem, and the most serious for him, was his own situation. It was not possible for him to go there without his carriage, which was very well known and always had to wait outside her door. He could have made an accomplice of his coachman, as did most of his friends at the Social Club, but that was not in his nature. In fact, when his visits to Miss Lynch became too obvious, the liveried family coachman himself dared to ask if it would not be better for him to come back later so that the carriage would not spend so much time at her door. Dr. Urbino, in a sharp response that was not typical of him, cut him off.

And so that night he remembered Rosalba, the very first one, who had carried off the prize of his virginity and whose memory was still as painful as it had been the first day. He had only to close his eyes to see her in her muslin dress and her hat with the long silk ribbons, rocking her child’s cage on the deck of the boat. Several times in the course of the numerous years of his life he had been ready to set out in search of her, without knowing where, or her last name, or if she was the one he was looking for, but certain of finding her somewhere among groves of orchids. Each time, because of a real difficulty at the last minute or because of an ill-timed failure of his own will, his trip was postponed just as they were about to raise the gangplank: always for a reason that had something to do with Fermina Daza.

The distance from San Juan de la Ciénaga to the old plantation of San Pedro Alejandrino was only nine leagues, but the yellow train took the entire day to make the trip because the engineer was a friend of the regular passengers, who were always asking him to please stop so they could stretch their legs by strolling across the golf courses of the banana company, and the men bathed naked in the clear cold rivers that rushed down from the mountains, and when they were hungry they got off the train to milk the cows wandering in the pastures. Fermina Daza was terrified when they reached their destination, and she just had time to marvel at the Homeric tamarinds where The Liberator had hung his dying man’s hammock and to confirm that the bed where he had died, just as they had said, was small not only for so glorious a man but even for a seven-month-old infant.

They had planned to be together on Pentecost until she had to return to school, five minutes before the Angelus, but the tolling of the bells reminded Florentino Ariza of his promise to attend the funeral of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, and he dressed with more haste than usual. First, as always, he plaited her single braid that he himself had loosened before they made love, and he sat her on the table to tie the bow on her school shoes, which was something she never did well. He helped her without malice, and she helped him to help her, as if it were an obligation: after their first encounters they had both lost awareness of their ages, and they treated each other with the familiar-ity of a husband and wife who had hidden so many things in this life that there was almost nothing left for them to say to each other.

On the other hand, the sons of the great ruined families were dressed like old-fashioned princes, and some very poor boys went barefoot. Among so many oddities originating in so many places, Florentino Ariza was certainly among the o九_九_藏_书_网ddest, but not to the point of attracting undue attention. The harshest thing he heard was when someone shouted to him on the street: “When you’re ugly and poor, you can only want more.” In any event, the apparel imposed by necessity became, from that time on and for the rest of his life, the kind best suited to his enigmatic nature and solemn character.

So he palpated her internal organs with more intention than attention, and as he did so he discovered in amazement that this marvelous creature was as beautiful inside as out, and then he gave himself over to the delights of touch, no longer the best-qualified physician along the Caribbean coastline but a poor soul tormented by his tumultuous instincts. Only once before in his austere professional life had some-thing similar happened to him, and that had been the day of his greatest shame, because the indignant patient had moved his hand away, sat up in bed, and said to him: “What you want may happen, but it will not be like this.” Miss Lynch, on the other hand, aban-doned herself to his hands, and when she was certain that the Doctor was no longer thinking about his science, she said:

One night, after so much avoidance of the past, she arrived at Cousin Hildebranda’s ranch, and when she saw her waiting at the door she almost fainted: it was as if she were seeing herself in the mirror of truth. She was fat and old, burdened with unruly children whose father was not the man she still loved without hope but a soldier living on his pension whom she had married out of spite and who loved her to distraction. But she was still the same person inside her ruined body. Fermina Daza recovered from her shock after just a few days of country living and pleasant memories, but she did not leave the ranch except to go to Mass on Sundays with the grand-children of her wayward conspirators of long ago, cowboys on magnificent horses and beautiful, well-dressed girls who were just like their mothers at their age and who rode standing in oxcarts and singing in chorus until they reached the mission church at the end of the valley. She only passed through the village of Flores de María, where she had not gone on her earlier trip because she had not thought she would like it, but when she saw it she was fascinated. Her mis-fortune, or the village’s, was that she could never remember it after-ward as it was in reality, but only as she had imagined it before she had been there.

“Our code of ethics supposes,” he said, “that we doctors are made of wood.”

Florentino Ariza waited for them on the bridge with the provin-cial officials, surrounded by the crash of the music and the fireworks and the three heavy screams from the ship, which enveloped the dock in steam. Juvenal Urbino greeted the members of the reception line with that naturalness so typical of him, which made everyone think the Doctor bore him a special fondness: first the ship’s captain in his dress uniform, then the Archbishop, then the Governor with his and the Mayor with his, and then the military commander, who was a newcomer from the Andes. Beyond the officials stood Floren-tino Ariza, dressed in dark clothing and almost invisible among so many eminent people. After greeting the military commander, Fermina seemed to hesitate before Florentino Ariza’s outstretched hand. The military man, prepared to introduce them, asked her if they did not know each other. She did not say yes and she did not say no, but she held out her hand to Florentino Ariza with a salon smile. The same thing had occurred twice in the past, and would occur again, and Florentino Ariza always accepted these occasions with a strength of character worthy of Fermina Daza. But that after-noon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

“Oh, my dear,” he sighed, “I would need another fifty years to tell you about it.”

This happened on a Monday. On Friday at seven o’clock in the evening, Fermina Daza sailed away on the regular boat to San Juan de la Ciénaga with only one trunk, in the company of her god-daughter, her face covered by a mantilla to avoid questions for herself and her husband. Dr. Juvenal Urbino was not at the dock, by mutual agreement, following an exhausting three-day discussion in which they decided that she should go to Cousin Hildebranda San-chez’s ranch in Flores de María for as long a time as she needed to think before coming to a final decision. Without knowing her reasons, the children understood it as a trip she had often put off and that they themselves had wanted her to make for a long time. Dr. Urbino arranged matters so that no one in his perfidious circle could engage in malicious speculation, and he did it so well that if Florentino Ariza could find no clue to Fermina Daza’s disappearance it was because in fact there was none, not because he lacked the means to investigate. Her husband had no doubts that she would come home as soon as she got over her rage. But she left certain that her rage would never end.

Florentino Ariza was looking after his guests in the main salon of the ship, still redolent of fresh paint and tar, when there was a burst of applause on the docks, and the band struck up a triumphal march. He had to repress the trembling that was almost as old as he was when he saw the beautiful woman of his dreams on her husband’s arm, splendid in her maturity, striding like a queen from another time past the honor guard in parade uniform, under the shower of paper streamers and flower petals tossed at them from the windows. Both responded to the ovation with a wave of the hand, but she was so dazzling, dressed in imperial gold from her high-heeled slippers and the foxtails at her throat to her bell-shaped hat, that she seemed to be alone in the midst of the crowd.

He did not deny the accusations of his conscience that it had been a thoughtless and inappropriate act, one he had rushed into for fear that the opportunity would never be repeated. He would have preferred something less brutal, something in the manner he had so often imagined, but fate had given him no choice. He left the house of mourning, full of sorrow at leaving her in the same state of upheaval in which he found himself, but there was nothing he could have done to prevent it because he felt that this barbarous night had been forever inscribed in both their destinies.

It was far from easy. Miss Lynch wanted her honor protected, she wanted security and love, in that order, and she believed that she deserved them. She gave Dr. Urbino the opportunity to seduce her but not to penetrate her inner sanctum, even when she was alone in the house. She would go no further than allowing him to repeat the ceremony of palpation and auscultation with all the ethical violations he could desire, but without taking off her clothes. For his part, he could not let go of the bait once he had bitten, and he continued his almost daily incursions. For reasons of a practical nature, it was close to impossible for him to maintain a continuing relationship with Miss Lynch, but he was too weak to stop, as he would later be too weak to go any further. This was his limit.

Leaning back as they sat close together on the sofa, they spoke about themselves, about what they had been before they met one afternoon who knows how long ago on the mule-drawn trolley. Their lives were spent in adjacent offices, and until now they had never spoken of anything except their daily work. As they talked, Florentino Ariza put his hand on her thigh, he began to caress her with the gentle touch of an experienced seducer, and she did not stop him, but she did not respond either, not even with a shudder for courtesy’s sake. Only when he tried to go further did she grasp his exploratory hand and kiss him on the palm.

“If I were fifty years younger,” he would say, “I would marry my namesake Leona. I cannot imagine a better wife.”

Although they maintained a formal correspondence concerning their children and other household matters, almost two years went by before either one could find a way back that was not mined with pride. During the second year, the children went to spend their school vacation in Flores de María, and Fermina Daza did the impossible and appeared content with her new life. That at least was the conclusion drawn by Juvenal Urbino from his son’s letters. Moreover, at that time the Bishop of Riohacha went there on a pastoral visit, riding under the pallium on his celebrated white mule with the trappings embroidered in gold.

“What is going on?” he asked.

As he was about to leave, he made a casual remark about that morning’s medical consultation, knowing that nothing pleases pa-tients more than talking about their ailments, and she was so splendid talking about hers that he promised he would return the next day, at four o’clock sharp, to examine her with greater care. She was dis-mayed: she knew that a doctor of his qualifications was far above her ability to pay, but he reassured her: “In this profession we try to have the rich pay for the poor.” Then he marked in his notebook: Miss Barbara Lynch, Mala Crianza Salt Marsh, Saturday, 4 p.m. Months later, Fermina Daza was to read that notation, augmented by details of the diagnosis, treatment, and evolution of the disease. The name attracted her attention, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was one of those dissolute artists from the New Orleans fruit boats, but the address made her think that she must come from Jamaica, a black woman, of course, and she eliminated her without a second thought as not being to her husband’s taste.

“The fact I thought so does not mean you cannot do,” she said. “Just think what it mean for poor black woman like me to have such a famous man notice her.”

So their love became impossible when the carriage at her door became too conspicuous, and after three months it became nothing less than ridiculous. Without time to say anything, Miss Lynch would go to the bedroom as soon as she saw her agitated lover walk in the door. She took the precaution of wearing a full skirt on the days she expected him, a charming skirt from Jamaica with red flowered ruffles, but with no underwear, nothing, in the belief that this convenience was going to help him ward off his fear. But he squandered every-thing she did to make him happy. Panting and drenched with perspiration, he rushed after her into the bedroom, throwing everything on the floor, his walking stick, his medical bag, his Panama hat, and he made panic-stricken love with his trousers down around his knees, with his jacket buttoned so that it would not get in his way, with his gold watch chain across his vest, with his shoes on, with every-thing on, and more concerned with leaving as soon as possible than with achieving pleasure.

“Hairless wonder!” he shouted.

It was the first time she had gone alone into that office, saturated with showers of creosote and crammed with books bound in the hides of unknown animals, blurred school pictures, honorary degrees, astrolabes, and elaborately worked daggers collected over the years: a secret sanctuary that she always considered the only part of her husband’s private life to which she had no access because it was not part of love, so that the few times she had been there she had gone with him, and the visits had always been very brief. She did not feel she had the right to go in alone, much less to engage in what seemed to be indecent prying. But there she was. She wanted to find the truth, and she searched for it with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it, and she was driven by an irresistible wind even stronger than her innate haughtiness, even stronger than her dignity: an agony that bewitched her.

The boat had to wait three days at the port of Tenerife while an emergency set was made for him. It was a perfect fit. But on the voyage home, trying to explain to the Captain how he had lost the first pair, Uncle Leo XII filled his lungs with the burning air of the jungle, sang the highest note he could, held it to his last breath as he tried to frighten the alligators that were sunning themselves and watching the passage of the boat with unblinking eyes, and the new set of false teeth sank into the current as well.

After that time, as he would say, it was more work than the pleasure of daytime love was worth to take off one’s clothes and put them back on again. So that the contamination of his clothing could occur only during one of his house calls or during some moment stolen from his nights of chess and films. This last possibility was difficult to prove, because unlike so many of her friends, Fermina Daza was too proud to spy on her husband or to ask someone else to do it for her. His schedule of house calls, which seemed best suited to infidelity, was also the easiest to keep an eye on, because Dr. Juvenal Urbino kept a detailed record of each of his patients, including the payment of his fees, from the first time he visited them until he ushered them out of this world with a final sign of the cross and some words for the salvation of their souls.

Fermina Daza, in fact, had sailed at midnight in the greatest secrecy and with her face covered by a black mantilla, not on a Cunard liner bound for Panama, however, but on the regular boat to San Juan de la Ciénaga, the city where she had been born and had lived until her adolescence, and for which she felt a growing home-sickness that became more and more difficult to bear as the years went by. In defiance of her husband’s will, and of the customs of the day, her only companion was a fifteen-year-old goddaughter who had been raised as a family servant, but the ship captains and the officials at each port had been notified of her journey. When she made her rash decision, she told her children that she was going to have a change of scene for three months or so with Aunt Hildebranda, but her determination was not to return. Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew the strength of her character very well, and he was so troubled that he accepted her decision with humility as God’s punishment for the gravity of his sins. But the lights on the boat had not yet been lost to view when they both repented of their weakness.

When they lived in the old city, Juvenal Urbino and his family would walk on Sundays from their house to the Cathedral for eight o’clock Mass, which for them was more a secular ceremony than a religious one. Then, when they moved, they continued to drive there for several years, and at times they visited with friends under the palm trees in the park. But when the temple of the theological seminary was built in La Manga, with a private beach and its own cemetery, they no longer went to the Cathedral except on very solemn occasions. Ignorant of these changes, Florentino Ariza waited Sunday after Sunday on the terrace of the Parish Café, watching the people coming out of all three Masses.

They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrine gardens. Excited by everyone’s shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon.

He remembered ángeles Alfaro, the most ephemeral and best loved of them all, who came for six months to teach string instruments at the Music School and who spent moonlit nights with him on the flat roof of her house, as naked as the day she was born, playing the most beautiful suites in all music on a cello whose voice became human between her golden thighs. From the first moonlit night, both of them broke their hearts in the fierce love of inexperience. But ángeles Alfaro left as she had come, with her tender sex and her sinner’s cello, on an ocean liner that flew the flag of oblivion, and all that remained of her on the moonlit roofs was a fluttered farewell with a white handkerchief like a solitary sad dove on the horizon, as if she were a verse from the Poetic Festival. With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.” He wept copious tears at the grief of parting. But as soon as the ship had disappeared over the horizon, the memory of Fermina Daza once again occupied all his space.

And then he told her everything, feeling as if he were lifting the weight of the world from his shoulders, because he was convinced that she already knew and only needed to confirm the details. But she did not, of course, so that as he spoke she began to cry again, not with her earlier timid sobs but with abundant salty tears that ran down her cheeks and burned her nightdress and inflamed her life, because he had not done what she, with her heart in her mouth, had hoped he would do, which was to be a man: deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and grow indignant at the false accusation, and shout curses at this ill-begotten society that did not hesitate to trample on one’s honor, and remain imperturbable even when faced with crushing proofs of his disloyalty. Then, when he told her that he had been with his confessor that afternoon, she feared she would go blind with rage. Ever since her days at the Academy she had been convinced that the men and women of the Church lacked any virtue inspired by God. This was a discordant note in the harmony of the house, which they had managed to over-look without mishap. But her husband’s allowing his confessor to be privy to an intimacy that was not only his but hers as well was more than she could bear.

The loss of his teeth, on the other hand, did not result from a natural calamity but from the shoddy work of an itinerant dentist who decided to eradicate a simple infection by drastic means. His terror of the drill had prevented Florentino Ariza from visiting a dentist, despite his constant toothaches, until the pain became un-bearable. His mother was alarmed by a night of inconsolable moaning from the room next to hers, because these moans seemed to be the same as the ones from another time, which had almost disappeared in the mists of her memory, but when she made him open his mouth to see where love was hurting him, she discovered that he had fallen victim to abscesses.

It was a typical Antillean house, painted yellow even to the tin roof, with burlap windows and pots of carnations and ferns hanging in the doorway. It rested on wooden pilings in the salt marshes of Mala Crianza. A troupial sang in the cage that hung from the eaves. Across the street was a primary school, and the children rushing out obliged the coachman to keep a tight hold on the reins so that the horse would not shy. It was a stroke of luck, for Miss Barbara Lynch had time to recognize the Doctor. She waved to him as if they were old friends, she invited him to have coffee while the confusion abated, and he was delighted to accept (although it was not his custom to drink coffee) and to listen to her talk about herself, which was the only thing that had interested him since the morning and the only thing that was going to interest him, without a moment’s respite, during the months to follow. Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with his wife present, that sooner or later he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger the stability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself, knew the strength of his moral roots, had laughed at the prediction. And now it had come true.

He was immersed in L’Ile des pingouins, the novel that everyone was reading in those days, and he answered without surfacing: “Oui.” She insisted:

“You must have been dreaming.”

“Just as bad,” she said, “and only now I understand: it was the smell of a black woman.”

She was left dangling, barely at the entrance of her tunnel of solitude, while he was already buttoning up again, as exhausted as if he had made absolute love on the dividing line between life and death, when in reality he had accomplished no more than the physical act that is only a part of the feat of love. But he had finished in time: the exact time needed to give an in-jection during a routine visit. Then he returned home ashamed of his weakness, longing for death, cursing himself for the lack of courage that kept him from asking Fermina Daza to pull down his trousers and burn his ass on the brazier.

That was all she said. She lowered her glasses and continued darning socks. Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew then that the long hours of anguish were over. The moment had not been as he had foreseen it; rather than a seismic tremor in his heart, it was a calming blow, and a great relief that what was bound to happen sooner or later had happened sooner rather than later: the ghost of Miss Barbara Lynch had entered his house at last.