Florentino Ariza pressed her hand, bent toward her, and tried to kiss her on the cheek. But she refused, in her hoarse, soft voice.

“I don’t see what sense so many visits would make,” she said.

The story in Justice concluded by saying that Lorenzo Daza did not leave San Juan de la Ciénaga at the end of the last century in search of better opportunities for his daughter’s future, as he liked to say, but because he had been found out in his prosperous business of adulterating imported tobacco with shredded paper, which he did with so much skill that not even the most sophisticated smokers noticed the deception. They also uncovered his links to a clandestine international enterprise whose most profitable business at the end of the last century had been the illegal smuggling of Chinese from Panama. On the other hand, his suspect mule trading, which had done so much harm to his reputation, seemed to be the only honest business he had ever engaged in.

Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.

“I do,” he said. “That is why they are the first things returned when an affair is ended.”

Florentino Ariza, in fact, was surprised by the changes, and would be even more surprised the following day, when navigation became more difficult and he realized that the Magdalena, father of waters, one of the great rivers of the world, was only an illusion of memory. Captain Samaritano explained to them how fifty years of uncon-trolled deforestation had destroyed the river: the boilers of the river-boats had consumed the thick forest of colossal trees that had op-pressed Florentino Ariza on his first voyage. Fermina Daza would not see the animals of her dreams: the hunters for skins from the tanneries in New Orleans had exterminated the alligators that, with yawning mouths, had played dead for hours on end in the gullies along the shore as they lay in wait for butterflies, the parrots with their shrieking and the monkeys with their lunatic screams had died out as the foliage was destroyed, the manatees with their great breasts that had nursed their young and wept on the banks in a forlorn woman’s voice were an extinct species, annihilated by the armored bullets of hunters for sport.

The days that followed were hot and interminable. The river became muddy and narrow, and instead of the tangle of colossal trees that had astonished Florentino Ariza on his first voyage, there were calcinated flatlands stripped of entire forests that had been devoured by the boilers of the riverboats, and the debris of god-forsaken villages whose streets remained flooded even in the crudest droughts. At night they were awakened not by the siren songs of manatees on the sandy banks but by the nauseating stench of corpses floating down to the sea. For there were no more wars or epidemics, but the swollen bodies still floated by. The Captain, for once, was solemn: “We have orders to tell the passengers that they are acci-dental drowning victims.” Instead of the screeching of the parrots and the riotous noise of invisible monkeys, which at one time had intensified the stifling midday heat, all that was left was the vast silence of the ravaged land.

“Take a boat,” said Florentino Ariza.

“If we’re going to do it, let’s do it,” she said, “but let’s do it like grownups.”

In the middle of the bustling market, a very old man with an inconsolable expression on his face was pulling chicks out of the pockets of his beggar’s coat. He had appeared without warning, making his way through the crowd in a tattered overcoat that had belonged to someone much taller and heavier than he. He took off his hat, placed it brim up on the dock in case anyone wanted to throw him a coin, and began to empty his pockets of handfuls of pale baby chicks that seemed to proliferate in his fingers. In only a moment the dock appeared to be carpeted with cheeping chicks running everywhere among hurried travelers who trampled them without realizing it. Fascinated by the marvelous spectacle that seemed to be performed in her honor, for she was the only person watching it, Fermina Daza did not notice when the passengers for the return trip began to come on board. The party was over: among them she saw many faces she knew, some of them friends who until a short while ago had attended her in her grief, and she rushed to take refuge in her cabin. Florentino Ariza found her there, distraught: she would rather die than be seen on a pleasure trip, by people she knew, so soon after the death of her husband. Her pre-occupation affected Florentino Ariza so much that he promised to think of some way to protect her other than keeping her in the cabin.

Two days later, however, he received a letter from Fermina Daza in which she begged him not to call again. Her reasons were valid. There were so few telephones in the city that all communication took place through an operator who knew all the subscribers, their lives, their miracles, and it did not matter if they were not at home: she would find them wherever they might be. In return for such efficiency she kept herself informed of their conversations, she un-covered the secrets, the best-kept dramas of their private lives, and it was not unusual for her to interrupt a conversation in order to express her point of view or to calm tempers. Then, too, that year marked the founding of Justice, an evening newspaper whose sole purpose was to attack the families with long last names, inherited and unencumbered names, which was the publisher’s revenge because his sons had not been admitted to the Social Club.

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

“My God, man!” she exclaimed. “It never occurred to me.”

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

She sat with her second cup of tea halfway to her mouth and rebuked him with eyes that had survived so many inclemencies.

Her persistent memory of him increased her rage. When she awoke thinking about him on the day after the funeral, she succeeded in removing him from her thoughts by a simple act of will. But the rage always returned, and she realized very soon that the desire to forget him was the strongest inducement for remembering him. Then, overcome by nostalgia, she dared to recall for the first time the illusory days of that unreal love. She tried to remember just how the little park was then, and the shabby almond trees, and the bench where he had loved her, because none of it still existed as it had been then. They had changed everything, they had removed the trees with their carpet of yellow leaves and replaced the statue of the decapitated hero with that of another, who wore his dress uniform but had no name or dates or reasons to justify him, and who stood on an ostentatious pedestal in which they had installed the electrical controls for the district. Her house, sold many years before, had fallen into total ruin at the hands of the Provincial Government. It was not easy for her to imagine Florentino Ariza as he had been then, much less to believe that the taciturn boy, so vulnerable in the rain, was the moth-eaten old wreck who had stood in front of her with no consideration for her situation, or the slightest respect for her grief, and had seared her soul with a flaming insult that still made it difficult for her to breathe.

FERMINA DAZA could not have imagined that her letter, in-spired by blind rage, would have been interpreted by Florentino Ariza as a love letter. She had put into it all the fury of which she was capable, her crudest words, the most wounding, most unjust vilifica-tions, which still seemed minuscule to her in light of the enormity of the offense. It was the final act in a bitter exorcism through which she was attempting to come to terms with her new situation. She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity. She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered with-out purpose, asking herself in anguish which of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.

Nevertheless, on the night she met him in the movie theater just after her return from Flores de María, something strange occurred in her heart. She was not surprised that he was with a woman, and a black woman at that. What did surprise her was that he was so well pre-served, that he behaved with the greatest self-assurance, and it did not occur to her that perhaps it was she, not he, who had changed after the troubling explosion of Miss Lynch in her private life. From then on, and for more than twenty years, she saw him with more compassionate eyes. On the night of the vigil for her husband, it not only seemed reasonable for him to be there, but she even understood it as the natural end of rancor: an act of forgiving and forgetting. That was why she was so taken aback by his dramatic reiteration of a love that for her had never existed, at an age when Florentino Ariza and she could expect nothing more from life.

His visits soon began to acquire an awkward familial amplitude, for Dr. Urbino Daza and his wife would sometimes appear as if by accident, and they would stay to play cards. Florentino Ariza did not know how to play, but Fermina taught him in just one visit and they both sent a written challenge to the Urbino Dazas for the fol-lowing Tuesday. The games were so pleasant for everyone that they soon became as official as his visits, and patterns were established for each person’s contribution. Dr. Urbino and his wife, who was an excellent confectioner, brought exquisite pastries, a different one each time. Florentino Ariza continued to bring delicacies from the Euro-pean ships, and Fermina Daza found a way to contribute a new sur-prise each time. They played on the third Tuesday of every month, and although they did not wager with money, the loser was obliged to contribute something special to the next game.

“Do you mean what you say?” he asked.

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

This was the last in a chain of clues that led to Lorenzo Daza as the final link in a vast international operation. It was a masterful fraud, for the bills had the watermarks of the original paper: one-dollar bills had been erased by a chemical process that seemed to be magic, and reprinted as hundred-dollar notes. Lorenzo Daza claimed that the wardrobe had been purchased long after his daugh-ter’s wedding, and that it must have come into the house with the bills already in it, but the police proved that it had been there since the days when Fermina Daza had been in school. He was the only one who could have hidden the counterfeit fortune behind the mirrors. This was all Dr. Urbino told his wife when he promised the Governor that he would send his father-in-law back to his own country in order to cover up the scandal. But the newspaper told much more.

“Are you speaking of the Widow Urbino?”

“Those of us who make the rules have the greatest obligation to abide by them,” he had said to him.

Two days later she received a different kind of letter from him: handwritten on linen paper and his complete name inscribed with great clarity on the back of the envelope. It was the same ornate handwriting as in his earlier letters, the same will to lyricism, but applied to a simple paragraph of gratitude for the courtesy of her greeting in the Cathedral. For several days after she read the letter Fermina Daza continued to think about it with troubled memories, but with a conscience so clear that on the following Thursday she suddenly asked Lucrecia del Real del Obispo if she happened to know Florentino Ariza, the, owner of the riverboats. Lucrecia replied that she did: “He seems to be a wandering succubus.” She repeated the common gossip that he had never had a woman although he was such a good catch, and that he had a secret office where he took the boys he pursued at night along the docks. Fermina Daza had heard that story for as long as she could remember, and she had never believed it or given it any importance.

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

For that very reason she could make no other reply. Florentino Ariza had not thought of it either until that moment, and he decided to risk it with no reservations. He took one of the office typewriters home, his subordinates joking good-naturedly: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Leona Cassiani, enthusiastic about anything new, offered to give him typing lessons at home. But he had been opposed to methodical learning ever since Lotario Thugut had wanted to teach him to play the violin by reading notes and warned him that he would need at least a year to begin, five more to qualify for a professional orchestra, and six hours a day for the rest of his life in order to play well. And yet he had convinced his mother to buy him a blind man’s violin, and with the five basic rules given him by Lotario Thugut, in less than a year he had dared to play in the choir of the Cathedral and to serenade Fermina Daza from the paupers’ cemetery according to the direction of the winds. If that had been the case at the age of twenty, with something as difficult as the violin, he did not see why it could not also be the case at the age of seventy-six, with a one-finger instrument like the typewriter.

The first Monday was his worst day. The pain had eased and the medical prognosis was very encouraging, but he refused to accept the fatality of not seeing Fermina Daza the following afternoon for the first time in four months. Nevertheless, after a resigned siesta, he submitted to reality and wrote her a note excusing himself. He wrote it by hand on perfumed paper and in luminous ink so that it could be read in the dark, and with no sense of shame he dramatized the gravity of his accident in an effort to arouse her compassion. She answered him two days later, very sympathetic, very kind, with-out one word extra, just as in the great days of their love. He seized the opportunity as it flew by and wrote to her again. When she answered a second time, he decided to go much further than in their coded Tuesday conversations, and he had a telephone installed next to his bed on the pretext of keeping an eye on the company’s daily affairs. He asked the operator to connect him with the three-digit number that he had known by heart since the first time he dialed it. The quiet voice strained by the mystery of distance, the beloved voice answered, recognized the other voice, and said good-bye after three conventional phrases of greeting. Florentino Ariza was devastated by her indifference: they were back at the beginning.

He made a bold move.

The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing. On the contrary, it strengthened the conviction that Fermina Daza had always had, that the feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love. Despite her rough honesty she did not intend to disclose that to him, either by mail or in person, nor did she have it in her heart to tell him how false the sentimentalities of his letters sounded after the miraculous consolation of his written meditations, how his lyrical lies cheapened him, how detrimental his maniacal insistence on recap-turing the past was to his cause. No: not one line of his letters of long ago, not a single moment of her own despised youth, had made her feel that Tuesday afternoons without him could be as tedious, as lonely, and as repetitious as they really were.

At five o’clock he was beginning to doze off, when the ship’s purser woke him in the port of Zambrano to hand him an urgent telegram. It was signed by Leona Cassiani and dated the previous day, and all its horror was contained in a single line: América Vicu?a dead yesterday reasons unknown. At eleven o’clock in the morning he learned the details from Leona Cassiani in a telegraphic conference during which he himself operated the transmitting equipment for the first time since his years as a telegraph operator. América Vicu?a, in the grip of mortal depression because she had failed her final examinations, had drunk a flask of laudanum stolen from the school infirmary. Florentino Ariza knew in the depths of his soul that the story was incomplete. But no: América Vicu?a had left no explana-tory note that would have allowed anyone to be blamed for her decision. The family, informed by Leona Cassiani, was arriving now from Puerto Padre, and the funeral would take place that afternoon at five o’clock. Florentino Ariza took a breath. The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

“Sanctuary for a poor orphan,” he said.

Soon afterward, however, the occasion arose on its own. They had moved far afield of the subject when a maid interrupted them to hand Fermina Daza a letter that had just arrived by special urban mail, a recent creation that used the same method of distribution as telegrams. As always, she could not find her reading glasses. Florentino Ariza remained calm.

“Love is ridiculous at our age,” she shouted, “but at theirs it is revolting.”

“We called each other tú before,” he said.

Most of the passengers, above all the Europeans, abandoned the pestilential stench of their cabins and spent the night walking the decks, brushing away all sorts of predatory creatures with the same towel they used to dry their incessant perspiration, and at dawn they were exhausted and swollen with bites. An English traveler at the beginning of the nineteenth century, referring to the journey by canoe and mule that could last as long as fifty days, had written: “This is one of the most miserable and uncomfortable pilgrimages that a human being can make.” This had no longer been true during the first eighty years of steam navigation, and then it became true again forever when the alligators ate the last butterfly and the ma-ternal manatees were gone, the parrots, the monkeys, the villages were gone: everything was gone.

“They can all go to hell,” she said. “If we widows have any advantage, it is that there is no one left to give us orders.”

Fermina Daza was horrified when she heard the boat’s horn with her good ear, but by the second day of anisette she could hear better with both of them. She discovered that roses were more fragrant than before, that the birds sang at dawn much better than before, and that God had created a manatee and placed it on the bank at Tamalameque just so it could awaken her. The Captain heard it, had the boat change course, and at last they saw the enormous matron nursing the baby that she held in her arms. Neither Floren-tino nor Fermina was aware of how well they understood each other: she helped him to take his enemas, she got up before he did to brush the false teeth he kept in a glass while he slept, and she solved the problem of her misplaced spectacles, for she could use his for reading and mending. When she awoke one morning, she saw him sewing a button on his shirt in the darkness, and she hurried to do it for him before he could say the ritual phrase about needing two wives. On the other hand, the only thing she needed from him was that he cup a pain in her back.

“I hadn’t thought they made any sense,” he said.

At seven o’clock the first departure warning was sounded, and Fermina Daza felt it resonate with a sharp pain in her left ear. The night before, her dreams had been furrowed with evil omens that she did not dare to decipher. Very early in the morning she had ordered the car to take her to the nearby seminary burial ground, which in those days was called La Manga Cemetery, and as she stood in front of his crypt, she made peace with her dead husband in a monologue in which she freely recounted all the just recrimina-tions she had choked back. Then she told him the details of the trip and said goodbye for now. She refused to tell anyone anything except that she was going away, which is what she had done when-ever she had gone to Europe, in order to avoid exhausting farewells. Despite all her travels, she felt as if this were her first trip, and as the day approached her agitation increased. Once she was on board she felt abandoned and sad, and she wanted to be alone to cry.

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

Florentino Ariza listened to him without blinking. Then he looked through the windows at the complete circle of the quadrant on the mariner’s compass, the clear horizon, the December sky without a single cloud, the waters that could be navigated forever, and he said:

They would not have thought of leaving the cabin if the Captain had not written them a note informing them that after lunch they would reach golden La Dorada, the last port on the eleven-day journey. From the cabin Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza saw the promontory of houses lit by a pale sun, and they thought they understood the reason for its name, but it seemed less evident to them when they felt the heat that steamed like a caldron and saw the tar bubbling in the streets. Moreover, the boat did not dock there but on the opposite bank, where the terminal for the Santa Fe Railroad was located.

In one of her attacks of simplification, she had relegated to the stables the radioconsole that her husband had given her as an anniver-sary gift, and which both of them had intended to present to the Museum as the first in the city. In the gloom of her mourning she had resolved not to use it again, for a widow bearing her family names could not listen to any kind of music without offending the memory of the dead, even if she did so in private. But after her third solitary Tuesday she had it brought back to the drawing room, not to enjoy the sentimental song on the Riobamba station, as she had done before, but to fill her idle hours with the soap operas from Santiago de Cuba. It was a good idea, for after the birth of her daughter she had begun to lose the habit of reading that her husband had inculcated with so much diligence ever since their honeymoon, and with the progres-sive fatigue of her eyes she had stopped altogether, so that months would go by without her knowing where she had left her reading glasses.

A moment before she said it, the thought had not even occurred to her, but all she had to do was admit the possibility for it to be considered a reality. Her son and daughter-in-law were delighted when they heard the news. Florentino Ariza hastened to point out that on his vessels Fermina Daza would be a guest of honor, she would have a cabin to herself which would be just like home, she would enjoy perfect service, and the Captain himself would attend to her safety and well-being. He brought route maps to encourage her, picture postcards of furious sunsets, poems to the primitive paradise of the Magdalena written by illustrious travelers and by those who had become travelers by virtue of the poems. She would glance at them when she was in the mood.

But it was only his usual ailment. Florentino Ariza thanked God for that on Friday, at five o’clock sharp, when the maid led him through the darkness of the drawing room to the terrace in the patio, where he saw Fermina Daza sitting beside a small table set for two. She offered him tea, chocolate, or coffee. Florentino Ariza asked for coffee, very hot and very strong, and she told the maid: “The usual for me.” The usual was a strong infusion of different kinds of Oriental teas, which raised her spirits after her siesta. By the time she had emptied the teapot and he the coffeepot, they had both attempted and then broken off several topics of conversation, not so much because they were really interested in them but in order to avoid others that neither dared to broach.

In any case, unlike the other riverboats, ancient and modem, New Fidelity boasted a suite next to the Captain’s quarters that was spacious and comfortable: a sitting room with bamboo furniture covered in festive colors, a double bedroom decorated in Chinese motifs, a bathroom with tub and shower, a large, enclosed observa-tion deck with hanging ferns and an unobstructed view toward the front and both sides of the boat, and a silent cooling system that kept out external noises and maintained a climate of perpetual spring. These deluxe accommodations, known as the Presidential Suite be-cause three Presidents of the Republic had already made the trip in them, had no commercial purpose but were reserved for high-ranking officials and very special guests. Florentino Ariza had ordered the suite built for that public purpose as soon as he was named President of the R.C.C., but his private conviction was that sooner or later it was going to be the joyous refuge of his wedding trip with Fermina Daza.

He did. Fermina Daza instructed the steward to let her sleep as long as she wanted, and when she awoke there was a vase on the night table with a fresh white rose, drops of dew still on it, as well as a letter from Florentino Ariza with as many pages as he had written since his farewell to her. It was a calm letter that did not attempt to do more than express the state of mind that had held him captive since the previous night: it was as lyrical as the others, as rhetorical as all of them, but it had a foundation in reality. Fermina Daza read it with some embarrassment because of the shameless racing of her heart. It concluded with the request that she advise the steward when she was ready, for the Captain was waiting on the bridge to show them the operation of the ship.

His relations with América Vicu?a were the only difficulty. He had repeated the order to his chauffeur to pick her up on Saturdays at ten o’clock in the morning at the school, but he did not know what to do with her during the weekends. For the first time he did not concern himself with her, and she resented the change. He placed her in the care of the servant girls and had them take her to the afternoon film, to the band concerts in the children’s park, to tｗｗｗ.99lｉｂ•ｎｅｔhe charity bazaars, or he arranged Sunday activities for her and her classmates so that he would not have to take her to the hidden paradise behind his offices, to which she had always wanted to return after the first time he took her there. In the fog of his new illusion, he did not realize that women can become adults in three days, and that three years had gone by since he had met her boat from Puerto Padre. No matter how he tried to soften the blow, it was a brutal change for her, and she could not imagine the reason for it. On the day in the ice cream parlor when he told her he was going to marry, when he revealed the truth to her, she had reeled with panic, but then the possibility seemed so absurd that she forgot about it. In a very short while, however, she realized that he was behaving with inexplicable evasiveness, as if it was true, as if he were not sixty years older than she, but sixty years younger.

“That will not be necessary,” he said. “The letter is mine.”

He indicated that she should come with him, and before he climbed into the automobile he said, although it was not necessary: “Today we are not going to do our things.” He took her to the American Ice Cream Shop, filled at this hour with parents eating ice cream with their children under the long blades of the fans that hung from the smooth ceiling. América Vicu?a ordered an enormous glass filled with layers of ice cream, each a different color, her favor-ite dish and the one that was the most popular because it gave off an aura of magic. Florentino Ariza drank black coffee and looked at the girl without speaking, while she ate the ice cream with a spoon that had a very long handle so that one could reach the bottom of the glass. Still looking at her, he said without warning:

“I mean,” he said, “that these letters are something very different.”

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

In a confused way he thought that one thing had something to do with the other, and he repeated the formula now with the fervor of a prayer, but it did not have the desired effect. A twisting in his guts like the coil of a spring lifted him from his seat, the foaming in his belly grew thicker and more painful, it grumbled a lament and left him covered with icy sweat. The maid who brought him the coffee was frightened by his corpse’s face. He sighed: “It’s the heat.” She opened the window, thinking she would make him more comfortable, but the afternoon sun hit him full in the face and she had to close it again. He knew he could not hold out another moment, and then Fermina Daza came in, almost invisible in the darkness, dismayed at seeing him in such a state.

He never imagined how much she suffered during her sleepless nights at school, during the weekends without him, during her life without him, be-cause he never imagined how much she loved him. He had been informed in an official letter from the school that she had fallen from her perpetual first place in the class to last, and that she had almost failed her final examinations. But he ignored his duty as guardian: he said nothing to América Vicu?a’s parents, restrained by a sense of guilt that he tried to elude, and he did not discuss it with her because of a well-founded fear that she would try to impli-cate him in her failure. And so he left things as they were. Without realizing it, he was beginning to defer his problems in the hope that death would resolve them.

In spite of everything, the delay had been a providential accident for them. Florentino Ariza had once read: “Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.” The humidity in the Presidential Suite sub-merged them in an unreal lethargy in which it was easier to love without questions. They spent unimaginable hours holding hands in the armchairs by the railing, they exchanged unhurried kisses, they enjoyed the rapture of caresses without the pitfalls of impatience. On the third stupefying night she waited for him with a bottle of anisette, which she used to drink in secret with Cousin Hildebranda’s band and later, after she was married and had children, behind closed doors with the friends from her borrowed world. She needed to be somewhat intoxicated in order not to think about her fate with too much lucidity, but Florentino Ariza thought it was to give herself courage for the final step. Encouraged by that illusion, he dared to explore her withered neck with his fingertips, her bosom armored in metal stays, her hips with their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins. She accepted with pleasure, her eyes closed, but she did not tremble, and she smoked and drank at regular intervals. At last, when his caresses slid over her belly, she had enough anisette in her heart.

She remembered that tomorrow was Thursday, the day when Lucrecia del Real del Obispo made her regular visit, but she had the perfect solution: “The day after tomorrow at five o’clock.” Florentino Ariza thanked her, bid an urgent farewell with his hat, and left without tasting the coffee. She stood in the middle of the drawing room, puzzled, not understanding what had just happened, until the sound of his automobile’s backfiring faded at the end of the street. Then Florentino Ariza shifted into a less painful position in the back seat, closed his eyes, relaxed his muscles, and surrendered to the will of his body. It was like being reborn. The driver, who after so many years in his service was no longer surprised at any-thing, remained impassive. But when he opened the door for him in front of his house, he said:

Florentino Ariza repeated the invitation later on, when she had decided to go on living without her husband, and then it had seemed more plausible. But after her quarrel with her daughter, embittered by the insults to her father, by her rancor toward her dead husband, by her anger at the hypocritical duplicities of Lucrecia del Real, whom she had considered her best friend for so many years, she felt herself superfluous in her own house. One afternoon, while she was drinking her infusion of worldwide leaves, she looked toward the morass of the patio where the tree of her misfortune would never bloom again.

She burst into laughter, a deep laugh like a young dove’s, and she thought again about the old couple in the boat. It was incised: the image would always pursue her. But that night she could bear it because she felt untroubled and calm, as she had few times in her life: free of all blame. She would have remained there until dawn, silent, with his hand perspiring ice into hers, but she could not endure the torment in her ear. So that when the music was over, and then the bustle of the ordinary passengers hanging their ham-mocks in the salon had ended, she realized that her pain was stronger than her desire to be with him. She knew that telling him about it would alleviate her suffering, but she did not because she did not want to worry him. For now it seemed to her that she knew him as well as if she had lived with him all her life, and she thought him capable of ordering the boat back to port if that would relieve her pain.

Then he looked at her and saw her naked to her waist, just as he had imagined her. Her shoulders were wrinkled, her breasts sagged, her ribs were covered by a flabby skin as pale and cold as a frog’s. She covered her chest with the blouse she had just taken off, and she turned out the light. Then he sat up and began to undress in the darkness, throwing everything at her that he took off, while she tossed it back, dying of laughter.

Florentino Ariza did not even refer to the terrible letter that she had sent him, but from the very beginning he attempted a new method of seduction, without any reference to past loves or even to the past itself: a clean slate. Instead, he wrote an extensive meditation on life based on his ideas about, and experience of, relations between men and women, which at one time he had intended to write as a complement to the Lovers’ Companion. Only now he disguised it in the patriarchal style of an old man’s memories so that it would not be too obvious that it was really a document of love. First he wrote many drafts in his old style, which took longer to read with a cool head than to throw into the fire. But he knew that any conventional slip, the slightest nostalgic indiscretion, could revive the unpleasant taste of the past in her heart, and although he foresaw her returning a hun-dred letters to him before she dared open the first, he preferred that it not happen even once. And so he planned everything down to the last detail, as if it were the final battle: new intrigues, new hopes in a woman who had already lived a full and complete life. It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone’s. It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.

But when she heard it repeated with so much conviction by Lucrecia del Real del Obispo, who had also been rumored at one time to have strange tastes, she could not resist the urge to clarify matters. She said she had known Florentino Ariza since he was a boy. She reminded her that his mother had owned a notions shop on the Street of Windows and also bought old shirts and sheets, which she unraveled and sold as bandages during the civil wars. And she concluded with conviction: “He is an honorable man, and he is the soul of tact.” She was so vehement that Lucrecia took back what she had said: “When all is said and done, they also say the same sort of thing about me.” Fermina Daza was not curious enough to ask herself why she was making so passionate a defense of a man who had been no more than a shadow in her life. She continued to think about him, above all when the mail arrived without another letter from him. Two weeks of silence had gone by when one of the servant girls woke her during her siesta with a warning whisper:

At last he placed it, without the envelope, in the drawer of the night table, lay on his back with his hands behind his head, and for four hours he did not blink, he hardly breathed, he was more dead than a dead man, as he stared into the space in the mirror where she had been. Precisely at midnight he went to the kitchen and prepared a thermos of coffee as thick as crude oil, then he took it to his room, put his false teeth into the glass of boric acid solution that he always found ready for him on the night table, and resumed the posture of a recumbent marble statue, with momentary shifts in position when he took a sip of coffee, until the maid came in at six o’clock with a fresh thermos.

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

“It is a sin to burn this,” she would say, “when so many people do not even have enough to eat.”

“You do not have to cajole me as if I were a baby,” she told him. “If I go, it will be because I have decided to and not because the landscape is interesting.”

Fermina Daza, who had felt no fondness for the Captain, was so moved by the tenderhearted giant that from that morning on he occupied a privileged place in her heart. She was not wrong: the trip was just beginning, and she would have many occasions to realize that she had not been mistaken.

When she awoke on her first morning as a widow, she turned over in bed without opening her eyes, searching for a more comfort-able position so that she could continue sleeping, and that was the moment when he died for her. For only then did it become clear that he had spent the night away from home for the first time in years. The other place where this struck her was at the table, not because she felt alone, which in fact she was, but because of her strange belief that she was eating with someone who no longer existed. It was not until her daughter Ofelia came from New Orleans with her husband and the three girls that she sat at a table again to eat, but instead of the usual one, she ordered a smaller, improvised table set up in the corridor. Until then she did not take a regular meal.

She lay on her back in bed for a long time, thinking, and when she returned to school an hour early she was beyond all desire to cry, and she had sharpened her sense of smell along with her claws so that she could track down the miserable whore who had ruined her life. Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, made another masculine mis-judgment: he believed that she had been convinced of the futility of her desires and had resolved to forget him.

At times the sound of airplanes took her by surprise. She had seen them flying very low and performing acrobatic maneuvers on the centenary of the death of The Liberator. One of them, as black as an enormous turkey buzzard, grazed the roofs of the houses in La Manga, left a piece of wing in a nearby tree, and was caught in the electrical wires. But not even that had convinced Fermina Daza of the existence of airplanes. In recent years she had not even had the curiosity to go to Manzanillo Bay, where seaplanes landed on the water after the police launches had warned away the fishermen’s canoes and the growing numbers of recreational boats. Because of her age, she had been chosen to greet Charles Lindbergh with a bouquet of roses when he came here on his goodwill flight, and she could not understand how a man who was so tall, so blond, so handsome, could go up in a contraption that looked as if it were made of corrugated tin and that two mechanics had to push by the tail to help lift it off the ground. She just could not get it through her head that airplanes not much larger than that one could carry eight people. On the other hand, she had heard that the riverboats were a delight because they did not roll like ocean liners, although there were other, more serious dangers, such as sandbars and attacks by bandits.

“In the society of the future,” he concluded, “you would have to visit the cemetery now to bring her and me a bouquet of arum lilies for lunch.”

Her hair, the color of stainless steel, had ennobled her face, but now it looked like ragged yellow strands of corn silk, and her beautiful panther eyes did not recover their old sparkle even in the brilliant heat of her anger. Her decision not to go on living was evident in every gesture. She had long ago given up smoking, whether locked in the bathroom or anywhere else, but she took it up again, for the first time in public, and with an uncon-trolled voracity, at first with cigarettes she rolled herself, as she had always liked to do, and then with ordinary ones sold in stores be-cause she no longer had time or patience to do it herself. Anyone else would have asked himself what the future could hold for a lame old man whose back burned with a burro’s saddle sores and a woman who longed for no other happiness but death. But not Florentino Ariza. He found a glimmer of hope in the ruins of disaster, for it seemed to him that Fermina Daza’s misfortune glorified her, that her anger beautified her, and that her rancor with the world had given her back the untamed character she had displayed at the age of twenty.

“Tell me something, lionlady of my soul,” asked Florentino Ariza. “How would you feel if you received a love letter written on that thing?”

“It is going to be like dying,” she said.

She could not avoid a profound feeling of rancor toward her hus-band for having left her alone in the middle of the ocean. Everything of his made her cry: his pajamas under the pillow, his slippers that had always looked to her like an invalid’s, the memory of his image in the back of the mirror as he undressed while she combed her hair before bed, the odor of his skin, which was to linger on hers for a long time after his death. She would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing and slap herself on the forehead because she suddenly remembered something she had forgotten to tell him. At every moment countless ordinary questions would come to mind that he alone could answer for her. Once he had told her something that she could not imagine: that amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches, in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.

She became aware of her frivolous public image long before she began to grow old, and in the house she was often heard to say: “We have to get rid of all these trinkets; there’s no room to turn around.” Dr. Urbino would laugh at her fruitless efforts, for he knew that the emptied spaces were only going to be filled again. But she persisted, because it was true that there was no room for anything else and nothing anywhere served any purpose, not the shirts hanging on the doorknobs or the overcoats for European winters squeezed into the kitchen cupboards. So that on a morning when she awoke in high spirits she would raze the clothes closets, empty the trunks, tear apart the attics, and wage a war of separation against the piles of clothing that had been seen once too often, the hats she had never worn because there had been no occasion to wear them while they were still in fashion, the shoes copied by European artists from those used by empresses for their coronations, and which were scorned here by highborn ladies because they were identical to the ones that black women bought at the market to wear in the house. For the entire morning the interior terrace would be in a state of crisis, and in the house it would be difficult to breathe because of bitter gusts from the mothballs. But in a few hours order would be reestablished because she at last took pity on so much silk strewn on the floor, so many leftover brocades and useless pieces of passementerie, so many silver fox tails, all condemned to the fire.

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

Florentino Ariza was serious, of course, and he signed the order. After all, everyone knew that the time of cholera had not ended despite all the joyful statistics from the health officials. As for the ship, there was no problem. The little cargo they had taken on was transferred, they told the passengers there had been a mechanical failure, and early that morning they sent them on their way on a ship that belonged to another company. If such things were done for so many immoral, even contemptible reasons, Florentino Ariza could not see why it would not be legitimate to do them for love. All that the Captain asked was that they stop in Puerto Nare to pick up someone who would accompany him on the voyage: he, too, had his secret heart.

Well, then: Dr. Urbino Daza wanted to thank Florentino Ariza for the good companionship he gave his mother in the solitude of her widowhood, he begged him to continue doing so for the good of them both and the convenience of all, and to have patience with her senile whims. Florentino Ariza was relieved with the outcome of their interview. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I am now four years older than she is, and have been since long, long before you were born.” Then he succumbed to the temptation of giving vent to his feelings with an ironic barb.

There was no difference between Dr. Urbino Daza and his public image: his talents were limited, his manner awkward, and he suffered from sudden twitching, caused by either happiness or annoyance, and from inopportune blushing, which made one fear for his mental fortitude. But it was evident on first meeting him that he was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what Florentino Ariza most feared people would call him: a good man. His wife, on the other hand, was viva-cious and had a plebeian spark of sharp wit that gave a more human note to her elegance. One could not wish for a better couple to play cards with, and Florentino Ariza’s insatiable need for love overflowed with the illusion of feeling that he was part of a family.

It was a six-page letter, unlike any he had ever written before. It did not have the tone, or the style, or the rhetorical air of his early years of love, and his argument was so rational and measured that the scent of a gardenia would have been out of place. In a certain sense it was his closest approximation to the business letters he had never been able to write. Years later, a typed personal letter would be considered almost an insult, but at that time the typewriter was still an office animal without its own code of ethics, and its domestication for per-sonal use was not foreseen in the books on etiquette. It seemed more like bold modernity, which was how Fermina Daza must have under-stood it, for in her second letter to Florentino Ariza, she began by begging his pardon for any difficulties in reading her handwriting, since she did not have at her disposal any means more advanced than her steel pen.

“I am going to marry.”

They both decided to turn in when the music stopped, after a long, untroubled conversation on the dark observation deck. There was no moon, the sky was cloudy, and on the horizon flashes of lightning, with no claps of thunder, illuminated them for an instant. Florentino Ariza rolled cigarettes for her, but she did not smoke more than a few, for she was tormented by pain that would ease for a few moments and flare up again when the boat bellowed as it passed another ship or a sleeping village, or when it slowed to sound the depth of the river. He told her with what longing he had watched her at the Poetic Festival, on the balloon flight, on the acrobat’s velocipede, with what longing he had waited all year for public festivals just so he could see her. She had often seen him as well, and she had never imagined that he was there only to see her. How-ever, it was less than a year since she had read his letters and won-dered how it was possible that he had never competed in the Poetic Festival: there was no doubt he would have won. Florentino Ariza lied to her: he wrote only for her, verses for her, and only he read them. Then it was she who reached for his hand in the darkness, and she did not find it waiting for her as she had waited for his the night before. Instead, she took him by surprise, and Florentino Ariza’s heart froze.

There was nothing to be done. When at last she was convinced that she had no more options, Ofelia returned to New Orleans. After much pleading, her mother would only agree to say goodbye to her, but she would not allow her in the house: she had sworn on her mother’s grave, and for her, during those dark days, that was the only thing left that was still pure.

And so the burning was postponed, it was always postponed, and things were only shifted from their places of privilege to the stables that had been transformed into storage bins for remnants, while the spaces that had been cleared, just as he predicted, began to fill up again, to overflow with things that lived for a moment and then went to die in the closets: until the next time. She would say: “Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out.” That was true: she was dismayed by the voracity with which objects kept invading living spaces, displacing the humans, forcing them back into the corners, until Fermina Daza pushed the objects out of sight. For she was not as ordered as people thought, but she did have her own desperate method for appearing to be so: she hid the disorder. The day that Juvenal Urbino died, they had to empty out half of his study and pile the things in the bedrooms so there would be space to lay out the body.

The night before their arrival they had a grand party with paper garlands and colored lights. The weather cleared at nightfall. Holding each other very close, the Captain and Zenaida danced the first boleros that were just beginning to break hearts in those days. Florentino Ariza dared to suggest to Fermina Daza that they dance their private waltz, but she refused. Nevertheless she kept time with her head and her heels all night, and there was even a moment when she danced sitting down without realizing it, while the Captain merged with his young wild woman in the shadows of the bolero. She drank so much anisette that she had to be helped up the stairs, and she suffered an attack of laughing until she cried, which alarmed everyone. However, when at last she recovered her self-possession in the perfumed oasis of her cabin, they made the tranquil, whole-some love of experienced grandparents, which she would keep as her best memory of that lunatic voyage. Contrary to what the Captain and Zenaida supposed, they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

On one of his early visits, when he was talking about his ships, Florentino Ariza had given Fermina Daza a formal invitation to take a pleasure cruise along the river. With one more day of traveling by train she could visit the national capital, which they, like most Caribbeans of their generation, still called by the name it bore until the last century: Santa Fe. But she maintained the prejudices of her husband, and she did not want to visit a cold, dismal city where the women did not leave their houses except to attend five o’clock Mass and where, she had been told, they could not enter ice cream parlors or public offices, and where the funerals disrupted traffic at all hours of the day or night, and where it had been drizzling since the year one: wor99lib•netse than in Paris. On the other hand, she felt a very strong attraction to the river, she wanted to see the alligators sunning themselves on the sandy banks, she wanted to be awakened in the middle of the night by the woman’s cry of the manatees, but the idea of so arduous a journey at her age, and a lone widow besides, seemed unrealistic to her.

When Florentino Ariza left his bed, with his back on fire and carrying a walking stick for the first time instead of his umbrella, his first excursion was to Fermina Daza’s house. She was like a stranger, ravaged by age, whose resentment had destroyed her desire to live. Dr. Urbino Daza, in the two visits he had made to Florentino Ariza during his exile, had spoken to him of how disturbed his mother was by the two stories in Justice. The first provoked her to such irrational anger at her husband’s infidelity and her friend’s disloyalty that she renounced the custom of visiting the family mausoleum one Sunday each month, for it infuriated her that he, inside his coffin, could not hear the insults she wanted to shout at him: she had a quarrel with a dead man. She let Lucrecia del Real know, through anyone who would repeat it to her, that she should take comfort in having had at least one real man in the crowd of people who had passed through her bed. As for the story about Lorenzo Daza, there was no way to know which affected her more, the story itself or her belated discovery of her father’s true character. But one or the other, or both, had annihilated her.

They found the Captain in the dining room, in a disheveled condition that did not accord with his habitual neatness: he was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, his clothing was still sweaty from the previous night, his speech was interrupted by belches of anisette. Zenaida was asleep. They were beginning to eat their breakfast in silence, when a motor launch from the Health Department ordered them to stop the ship.

“Come back whenever you like,” she said. “I am almost always alone.”

In any event, the holocaust was in vain. In a very short while Fermina Daza realized that the memory of her dead husband was as resistant to the fire as it seemed to be to the passage of time. Even worse: after the incineration of his clothing, she continued to miss not only the many things she had loved in him but also what had most annoyed her: the noises he made on arising. That memory helped her to escape the mangrove swamps of grief. Above all else, she made the firm decision to go on with her life, remembering her husband as if he had not died. She knew that waking each morning would continue to be difficult, but it would become less and less so.

Ofelia Urbino had always been like that, resembling Do?a Blanca, her paternal grand-mother, more than if she had been her daughter. Like her she was distinguished, like her she was arrogant, and like her she lived at the mercy of her prejudices. Even at the age of five she had been incapable of imagining an innocent friendship between a man and a woman, least of all when they were eighty years old. In a bitter argument with her brother, she said that all Florentino Ariza needed to do to complete his consolation of their mother was to climb into her widow’s bed. Dr. Urbino Daza did not have the courage to face her, he had never had the courage to face her, but his wife inter-vened with a serene justification of love at any age. Ofelia lost her temper.

On her many journeys through the world, Fermina Daza had bought every object that attracted her attention because of its novelty. She desired these things with a primitive impulse that her husband was happy to rationalize, and they were beautiful, useful objects as long as they remained in their original environment, in the show windows of Rome, Paris, London, or in the New York, vibrating to the Charleston, where skyscrapers were beginning to grow, but they could not withstand the test of Strauss waltzes with pork cracklings or Poetic Festivals when it was ninety degrees in the shade. And so she would return with half a dozen enormous stand-ing trunks made of polished metal, with copper locks and corners like decorated coffins, lady and mistress of the world’s latest marvels, which were worth their price not in gold but in the fleeting moment when someone from her local world would see them for the first time. For that is why they had been bought: so that others could see them.

At the other end of the city was Leona Cassiani, alone and free and doubtless ready to provide him with the compassion he needed at two o’clock in the morning, at three o’clock, at any hour and under any circumstances. It would not be the first time he had knocked at her door in the wasteland of his sleepless nights, but he knew that she was too intelligent, and that they loved each other too much, for him to come crying to her lap and not tell her the reason. After a good deal of thought as he sleepwalked through the deserted city, it occurred to him that he could do no better than Prudencia Pitre, the Widow of Two, who was younger than he. They had first met in the last century, and if they stopped meeting it was because she refused to allow anyone to see her as she was, half blind and verging on decrepitude. As soon as he thought of her, Florentino Ariza returned to the Street of the Windows, put two bottles of port and a jar of pickles in a shopping bag, and went to visit her, not even knowing if she was still in her old house, if she was alone, or if she was alive.

“What I would like is to walk out of this house, and keep going, going, going, and never come back,” she said.

When there was nothing left to eat on the plates, the Captain wiped his lips with a corner of the tablecloth and broke into indecent slang that ended once and for all the reputation for fine speech enjoyed by the riverboat captains. For he was not speaking to them or to anyone else, but was trying instead to come to terms with his own rage. His conclusion, after a string of barbaric curses, was that he could find no way out of the mess he had gotten into with the cholera flag.

“And speaking hypothetically,” he said, “would it be possible to make a trip without stopping, without cargo or passengers, with-out coming into any port, without anything?”

“The poor old couple,” she said. “The ones who were beaten to death in the boat.”

Cousin Hildebranda Sánchez had come to visit a short while after Fermina Daza returned from the ranch in Flores de María, where she had gone to recuperate from the misfortune of Miss Lynch. Old, fat, and contented, she had arrived in the company of her oldest son who, like his father, had been a colonel in the army but had been repudiated by him because of his contemptible behavior during the massacre of the banana workers in San Juan de la Ciénaga. The two cousins saw each other often and spent endless hours feeling nostalgia for the time when they first met. On her last visit, Hildebranda was more nostalgic than ever, and very affected by the burden of old age. In order to add even greater poignancy to their memories, she had brought her copy of the portrait of them dressed as old-fashioned ladies, taken by the Belgian photographer on the afternoon that a young Juvenal Urbino had delivered the coup de grace to a willful Fermina Daza. Her copy of the photograph had been lost, and Hildebranda’s was almost invisible, but they could both recognize them-selves through the mists of disenchantment: young and beautiful as they would never be again.

It was a forbidden word: “before.” She felt the chimerical angel of the past flying overhead, and she tried to elude it. But he went even further: “Before, I mean, in our letters.” She was annoyed, and she had to make a serious effort to conceal it. But he knew, and he realized that he had to move with more tact, although the blunder showed him that her temper was still as short as it had been in her youth although she had learned to soften it.

There were so few places for taking on wood, and they were so far apart from each other, that by the fourth day of the trip the New Fidelity had run out of fuel. She was stranded for almost a week while her crew searched bogs of ashes for the last scattered trees. There was no one else: the woodcutters had abandoned their trails, fleeing the ferocity of the lords of the earth, fleeing the in-visible cholera, fleeing the larval wars that governments were bent on hiding with distracted decrees. In the meantime, the passengers in their boredom held swimming contests, organized hunting expedi-tions, and returned with live iguanas that they split open from top to bottom and sewed up again with baling needles after removing the clusters of soft, translucent eggs that they strung over the railings to dry. The poverty-stricken prostitutes from nearby villages followed in the path of the expeditions, improvised tents in the gullies along the shore, brought music and liquor with them, and caroused across the river from the stranded vessel.

While he finished off his portion of eggs, the tray of fried plantains, and the pot of café con leche, the ship left the bay with its boilers quiet, made its way along the channels through blankets of taruya, the river lotus with purple blossoms and large heart-shaped leaves, and returned to the marshes. The water was iridescent with the universe of fishes floating on their sides, killed by the dynamite of stealthy fishermen, and all the birds of the earth and the water circled above them with metallic cries. The wind from the Caribbean blew in the windows along with the racket made by the birds, and Fermina Daza felt in her blood the wild beating of her free will. To her right, the muddy, frugal estuary of the Great Magdalena River spread out to the other side of the world.

“My God,” she said, “ships make me so crazy.”

“In our day it was camellias, not roses.”

She would not have believed it in any event, even if it had been true, because his love letters were composed of similar phrases whose meaning mattered less than their brilliance. But she liked the spirited way in which he said it. Florentino Ariza, for his part, suddenly asked himself what he would never have dared to ask himself before: what kind of secret life had she led outside of her marriage? Nothing would have surprised him, because he knew that women are just like men in their secret adventures: the same stratagems, the same sudden inspirations, the same betrayals without remorse. But he was wise not to ask the question. Once, when her relations with the Church were already strained, her confessor had asked her out of the blue if she had ever been unfaithful to her husband, and she had stood up without responding, without concluding, without saying goodbye, and had never gone to confession again, with that confessor or with any other. But Florentino Ariza’s prudence had an unexpected reward: she stretched out her hand in the darkness, caressed his belly, his flanks, his almost hairless pubis. She said: “You have skin like a baby’s.” Then she took the final step: she searched for him where he was not, she searched again without hope, and she found him, unarmed.

That is how it always was: he would attempt to move forward, and she would block the way. But on this occasion, despite her ready answer, Florentino Ariza realized that he had hit the mark, because she had to turn her face so that he would not see her blush. A burn-ing, childish blush, with a life of its own and an insolence that turned her vexation on herself. Florentino Ariza was very careful to move to other, less offensive topics, but his courtesy was so obvious that she knew she had been found out, and that increased her anger. It was an evil Tuesday. She was on the point of asking him not to return, but the idea of a lovers’ quarrel seemed so ridiculous at their age and in their circumstances that it provoked a fit of laughter. The following Tuesday, when Florentino Ariza was placing the rose in the vase, she examined her conscience and discovered to her joy that not a vestige of resentment was left over from the previous week.

“Forever,” he said.

The letters that followed brought her complete calm. Still, she burned them after reading them with a growing interest, although burning them left her with a sense of guilt that she could not dissi-pate. So that when they began to be numbered, she found the moral justification she had been seeking for not destroying them. At any rate, her initial intention was not to keep them for herself but to wait for an opportunity to return them to Florentino Ariza so that something that seemed of such great human value would not be lost. The difficulty was that time passed and the letters continued to arrive, one every three or four days throughout the year, and she did not know how to return them without that appearing to be the rebuff she no longer wanted to give, and without having to explain everything in a letter that her pride would not permit her to write.

He needed Tránsito Ariza then as he never had before, he needed her wise words, her head of a mock queen adorned with paper flowers. He could not avoid it: whenever he found himself on the edge of catastrophe, he needed the help of a woman. So that he passed by the Normal School, seeking out those who were within reach, and he saw a light in the long row of windows in América Vicu?a’s dormi-tory. He had to make a great effort not to fall into the grandfather’s madness of carrying her off at two o’clock in the morning, warm with sleep in her swaddling clothes and still smelling of the cradle’s tantrums.

He soon made that ritual a part of his routine: he took advantage of his insomnia to write, and the next day, on his way to the office, he -would ask the driver to stop for a moment at a corner box, and he would get out to mail the letter. He never allowed the chauffeur to do it for him, as he attempted to do one rainy morning, and at times he took the precaution of car-rying several letters rather than just one, so that it would seem more natural. The chauffeur did not know, of course, that the additional letters were blank pages that Florentino Ariza addressed to himself, for he had never carried on a private correspondence with anyone, with the exception of the guardian’s report that he sent at the end of each month to the parents of América Vicu?a, with his personal impressions of the girl’s conduct, her state of mind and health, and the progress she was making in her studies.

Fermina Daza shuddered because she recognized his former voice, illuminated by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and she looked at the Captain: he was their destiny. But the Captain did not see her be-cause he was stupefied by Florentino Ariza’s tremendous powers of inspiration.

So the New Fidelity weighed anchor at dawn the next day, without cargo or passengers, and with the yellow cholera flag waving jubilantly from the mainmast. At dusk in Puerto Nare they picked up a woman who was even taller and stouter than the Captain, an uncommon beauty who needed only a beard to be hired by a circus. Her name was Zenaida Neves, but the Captain called her “my wild woman”: an old friend whom he would pick up in one port and leave in another, and who came on board followed by the winds of joy. In that sad place of death, where Florentino Ariza relived his memories of Rosalba when he saw the train from Envigado struggling to climb the old mule trail, there was an Amazonian downpour that would continue with very few pauses for the rest of the trip. But no one cared: the floating fiesta had its own roof. That night, as a personal contribution to the revelry, Fermina Daza went down to the galley amid the ovations of the crew and prepared a dish for everyone that she created and that Florentino Ariza christened Eggplant al Amor.

Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza had heard everything from their table, but that did not seem to matter to the Captain. He con-tinued to eat in silence, and his bad humor was evident in the manner in which he breached the rules of etiquette that sustained the legendary reputation of the riverboat captains. He broke apart his four fried eggs with the tip of his knife, and he ate them with slices of green plantain, which he placed whole in his mouth and chewed with savage delight. Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza looked at him without speaking, as if waiting on a school bench to hear their final grades. They had not exchanged a word during his conversation with the health patrol, nor did they have the slightest idea of what would become of their lives, but they both knew that the Captain was thinking for them: they could see it in the throbbing of his temples.

It was a splendid evening, which Captain Diego Samaritano seasoned with succulent tales of his forty years on the river, but Fermina Daza had to make an enormous effort to appear amused. Despite the fact that the final warning had been sounded at eight o’clock, when visitors had been obliged to leave and the gangplank had been raised, the boat did not set sail until the Captain had finished eating and gone up to the bridge to direct the operation. Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza stayed at the railing, surrounded by noisy passengers who made bets on how well they could identify the lights in the city, until the boat sailed out of the bay, moved along in-visible channels and through swamps spattered with the undulating lights of the fishermen, and at last took a deep breath in the open air of the Great Magdalena River. Then the band burst into a popular tune, there was a joyous stampede of passengers, and in a mad rush, the dancing began.

Until that moment Dr. Urbino Daza had not noticed the inappropriateness of his prognostications, and he became enmeshed in a long series of explanations that only made matters worse. But Florentino Ariza helped him to extricate himself. He was radiant, for he knew that sooner or later he was going to have another meeting like this one with Dr. Urbino Daza in order to satisfy an unavoidable social convention: the formal request for his mother’s hand in mar-riage. The lunch had been very encouraging, not only in and of itself but because it showed him how simple and well received that inexorable request was going to be. If he could have counted on Fermina Daza’s consent, no occasion would have been more propi-tious. Moreover, after their conversation at this historic lunch, the formality of a request was almost de trop.

“Let’s sing, then,” she said.

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

He was back in his element. At the end of six months he had heard nothing at all, and he found himself tossing and turning in bed until dawn, lost in the wasteland of a new kind of insomnia. He thought that Fermina Daza had opened the first letter because of its appearance, had seen the initial she knew from the letters of long ago, and had thrown it out to be burned with the rest of the trash without even taking the trouble to tear it up. Just seeing the envelopes of those that followed would be enough for her to do the same thing without even opening them, and to continue to do so until the end of time, while he came at last to his final written meditation. He did not be-lieve that the woman existed who could resist her curiosity about half a year of almost daily letters when she did not even know the color of ink they were written in, but if such a woman existed, it had to be her.

It was evident that everything was being used for the first time and had been bought just for the trip, with the exception of the well-worn belt of dark brown leather, which Fermina Daza noticed at first glance as if it were a fly in the soup. Seeing him like this, dressed just for her in so patent a manner, she could not hold back the fiery blush that rose to her face. She was embarrassed when she greeted him, and he was more embarrassed by her embarrassment. The knowledge that they were behaving as if they were sweethearts was even more embarrassing, and the knowledge that they were both embarrassed embarrassed them so much that Captain Samaritano noticed it with a tremor of compassion. He extricated them from their difficulty by spending the next two hours explaining the con-trols and the general operation of the ship. They were sailing very slowly up a river without banks that meandered between arid sand-bars stretching to the horizon. But unlike the troubled waters at the mouth of the river, these were slow and clear and gleamed like metal under the merciless sun. Fermina Daza had the impression that it was a delta filled with islands of sand.

It grew cooler as the sun went down, and the ship came back to life. The passengers seemed to emerge from a trance; they had just bathed and changed into fresh clothing, and they sat in the wicker armchairs in the salon, waiting for supper, which was announced at exactly five o’clock by a waiter who walked the deck from one end to the other and rang a sacristan’s bell, to mocking applause. While they were eating, the band began to play fandangos, and the dancing continued until midnight.

And so he returned on Tuesday at five o’clock, and then every Tuesday after that, and he ignored the convention of notifying her, because by the end of the second month the weekly visits had been incorporated into both their routines. Florentino Ariza brought English biscuits for tea, candied chestnuts, Greek olives, little salon delicacies that he would find on the ocean liners. One Tuesday he brought her a copy of the picture of her and Hildebranda taken by the Belgian photographer more than half a century before, which he had bought for fifteen centavos at a postcard sale in the Arcade of the Scribes.

“I have not,” he said. “Have you?”

He was right. He needed three days to learn the position of the letters on the keyboard, another six to learn to think while he typed, and three more to complete the first letter without errors after tear-ing up half a ream of paper. He gave it a solemn salutation--Se?ora--and signed it with his initial, as he had done in the perfumed love letters of his youth. He mailed it in an envelope with the mourning vignettes that were de rigueur for a letter to a recent widow, and with no return address on the back.

“Of course,” she said. “After all, letters belong to the person who writes them. Don’t you agree?”

After a long while, Florentino Ariza looked at Fermina Daza by the light of the river. She seemed ghostly, her sculptured profile softened by a tenuous blue light, and he realized that she was crying in silence. But instead of consoling her or waiting until all her tears had been shed, which is what she wanted, he allowed panic to overcome him.

Before he came to the heart of his intentions, Dr. Urbino Daza made several digressions on the subject of aging. He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people. He said: “Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.” He foresaw a more humanitarian and by the same token a more civilized future in which men and women would be isolated in marginal cities when they could no longer take care of themselves so that they might be spared the humiliation, suffering, and frightful loneliness of old age. From the medical point of view, according to him, the proper age limit would be seventy. But until they reached that degree of charity, the only solution was nursing homes, where the old could console each other and share their likes and dislikes, their habits and sorrows, safe from their natural disagreements with the younger generation. He said: “Old people, with other old people, are not so old.”

When her son suggested that his wife accompany her, she cut him off abruptly: “I am too big to have anyone take care of me.” She herself arranged the details of the trip. She felt immense relief at the thought of spending eight days traveling upriver and five on the return, with no more than the bare necessities: half a dozen cotton dresses, her toiletries, a pair of shoes for embarking and dis-embarking, her house slippers for the journey, and nothing else: her lifetime dream.

“But we did not discuss this,” he said.

It was the first time she had made love in over twenty years, and she had been held back by her curiosity concerning how it would feel at her age after so long a respite. But he had not given her time to find out if her body loved him too. It had been hurried and sad, and she thought: Now we’ve screwed up everything. But she was wrong: despite the disappointment that each of them felt, despite his regret for his clumsiness and her remorse for the madness of the anisette, they were not apart for a moment in the days that followed. Captain Samaritano, who uncovered by instinct any secret that any-one wanted to keep on his ship, sent them a white rose every morn-ing, had them serenaded with old waltzes from their day, had meals prepared for them with aphrodisiac ingredients as a joke. They did not try to make love again until much later, when the inspiration came to them without their looking for it. They were satisfied with the simple joy of being together.

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

He sat on the bed and read it through once as quickly as he could, more intrigued by the tone than by the content, and before he reached the second page he knew that it was in fact the insulting letter he had expected to receive. He laid it, unfolded, in the light shed by the bed-lamp, he took off his shoes and his wet socks, he turned out the over-head light, using the switch next to the door, and at last he put on his chamois mustache cover and lay down without removing his trousers and shirt, his head supported by two large pillows that he used as a backrest for reading. Now he read it again, this time syllable by syllable, scrutinizing each so that none of the letter’s secret intentions would be hidden from him, and then he read it four more times, until he was so full of the written words that they began to lose all mean-ing.

Even in his youth Florentino Ariza climbed up and down stairs with special care, for he had always believed that old age began with one’s first minor fall and that death came with the second. The staircase in his offices seemed the most dangerous of all to him be-cause it was so steep and narrow, and long before he had to make a special effort not to drag his feet, he would climb it with his eyes fixed on each step and both hands clutching the banister.藏书网 It had often been suggested that he replace it with one that was less dan-gerous, but he always put off the decision until next month because he thought it was a concession to old age. As the years passed, it took him longer and longer to walk up the stairs, not because it was harder for him, as he himself hurried to explain, but because he used greater and greater care in the climb.

Florentino Ariza felt the blow in the very center of his heart. He would have liked to find a reply as rapid and well aimed as an arrow, but the burden of his age defeated him: he had never been so exhausted by so brief a conversation, he felt pain in his heart, and each beat echoed with a metallic resonance in his arteries. He felt old, forlorn, useless, and his desire to cry was so urgent that he could not speak. They finished their second cup in a silence furrowed by presentiments, and when she spoke again it was to ask a maid to bring her the folder of letters. He was on the verge of asking her to keep them for herself, since he had made carbon copies, but he thought this precaution would seem ignoble. There was nothing else to say. Before he left he suggested coming back on the following Tuesday at the same time. She asked herself whether she should be so acquiescent.

“I command on this ship, but you command us,” he said. “So if you are serious, give me the order in writing and we will leave right now.”

Death’s passage through the house brought the solution. Once she had burned her husband’s clothes, Fermina Daza realized that her hand had not trembled, and on the same impulse she continued to light the fire at regular intervals, throwing everything on it, old and new, not thinking about the envy of the rich or the vengeance of the poor who were dying of hunger. Finally, she had the mango tree cut back at the roots until there was nothing left of that mis-fortune, and she gave the live parrot to the new Museum of the City. Only then did she draw a free breath in the kind of house she had always dreamed of: large, easy, and all hers.

Florentino Ariza, for his part, began to revive old memories with a violin borrowed from the orchestra, and in half a day he could play the waltz of “The Crowned Goddess” for her, and he played it for hours until they forced him to stop. One night, for the first time in her life, Fermina Daza suddenly awoke choking on tears of sorrow, not of rage, at the memory of the old couple in the boat beaten to death by the boatman. On the other hand, the in-cessant rain did not affect her, and she thought too late that perhaps Paris was not as gloomy as it had seemed, that Santa Fe did not have so many funerals passing along the streets. The dream of other voyages with Florentino Ariza appeared on the horizon: mad voyages, free of trunks, free of social commitments: voyages of love.

Florentino Ariza shuddered: as she herself had said, she had the sour smell of old age. Still, as he walked to his cabin, making his way through the labyrinth of sleeping hammocks, he consoled him-self with the thought that he must give off the same odor, except his was four years older, and she must have detected it on him, with the same emotion. It was the smell of human fermentation, which he had perceived in his oldest lovers and they had detected in him. The Widow Nazaret, who kept nothing to herself, had told him in a cruder way: “Now we stink like a henhouse.” They tolerated each other because they were an even match: my odor against yours. On the other hand, he had often taken care of América Vicu?a, whose diaper smell awakened maternal instincts in him, but he was disturbed at the idea that she had disliked his odor: the smell of a dirty old man. But all that belonged to the past. The important thing was that not since the afternoon when Aunt Escolástica left her missal on the counter in the telegraph office had Florentino Ariza felt the happiness he felt that night: so intense it frightened him.

Fermina Daza looked at him thoughtfully.

“That is true,” she said, “but the intention was different, and you know it.”

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

“Let us keep going, going, going, back to La Dorada.”

Meanwhile, he continued with his normal life. In anticipation of a favorable reply, he began a second renovation of his house so that it would be worthy of the woman who could have considered herself its lady and mistress from the day of its purchase. He visited Prudencia Pitre again several times, as he had promised, in order to prove to her that he loved her despite the devastation wrought by age, loved her in full sunlight and with the doors open, and not only on his nights of desolation. He continued to pass by Andrea Varón’s house until he found the bathroom light turned off, and he tried to lose himself in the wildness of her bed even though it was only so he would not lose the habit of love, in keeping with another of his superstitions, not disproved so far, that the body carries on for as long as you do.

“Be careful, Don Floro, that looks like cholera.”

It was eight o’clock at night. The two servant girls were in bed, and they had left on the light in the hallway that lit Florentino Ariza’s way to his bedroom. He knew that his Spartan, bland supper was on the table in the dining room, but the slight hunger he felt after so many days of haphazard eating vanished with the emotional upheaval of the letter. His hands were shaking so much that it was difficult for him to turn on the overhead light in the bedroom. He put the rain-soaked letter on the bed, lit the lamp on the night table, and with the feigned tranquillity that was his customary way of calming himself, he took off his wet jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, he took off his vest, folded it with care, and placed it on top of the jacket, he took off his black silk string tie and the celluloid collar that was no longer fashionable in the world, he unbuttoned his shirt down to his waist and loosened his belt so that he could breathe with greater ease, and at last he took off his hat and put it by the window to dry.

“How strange women are,” he said.

Nevertheless Florentino Ariza took the risk with Dr. Urbino Daza, and he was welcomed with special deference, although he was not asked to sign the gold book for notable guests. The lunch was brief, there were just the two of them, and its tone was subdued. The fears regarding the meeting that had troubled Florentino Ariza since the previous afternoon vanished with the port he had as an aperitif. Dr. Urbino Daza wanted to talk to him about his mother. Because of everything that he said, Florentino Ariza realized that she had spoken to her son about him. And something still more surprising: she had lied on his behalf. She told him that they had been childhood friends, playmates from the time of her arrival from San Juan de la Ciénaga, and that he had introduced her to reading, for which she was forever grateful. She also told him that after school she had often spent long hours in the notions shop with Tránsito Ariza, performing prodigious feats of embroidery, for she had been a notable teacher, and that if she had not continued seeing Florentino Ariza with the same frequency, it had not been through choice but because of how their lives had diverged.

Four days later, on Tuesday, he returned unannounced, and she did not wait for the tea to be served to tell him how much his letters had helped her. He said that they were not letters in the strict sense of the word, but pages from a book that he would like to write. She, too, had understood them in that way. In fact, she had intended to return them, if he would not take that as an insult, so that they could be put to better use. She continued speaking of how they had helped her during this difficult time, with so much enthusiasm, so much gratitude, perhaps with so much affection, that Florentino Ariza risked something more than a bold move: it was a somersault.

Florentino Ariza felt that his old age was not a rushing torrent but a bottomless cistern where his memory drained away. His ingenu-ity was wearing thin. After patrolling the villa in La Manga for several days, he realized that this strategy from his youth would never break down the doors sealed by mourning. One morning, as he was looking for a number in the telephone directory, he happened to come across hers. He called. It rang many times, and at last he recognized her grave, husky voice: “Hello?” He hung up without speaking, but the infinite distance of that unapproachable voice weakened his morale.

It was a long, hot day. Fermina Daza returned to her cabin after lunch for her inevitable siesta, but she did not sleep well because of a pain in her ear, which became worse when the boat exchanged mandatory greetings with another R.C.C. vessel as they passed each other a few leagues above Barranca Vieja. Florentino Ariza fell into instantaneous sleep in the main salon, where most of the passengers without cabins were sleeping as if it were midnight, and close to the spot where he had seen her disembark, he dreamed of Rosalba. She was traveling alone, wearing her Mompox costume from the last century, and it was she and not the child who slept in the wicker cage that hung from the ceiling. It was a dream at once so enigmatic and so amusing that he enjoyed it for the rest of the afternoon as he played dominoes with the Captain and two of the passengers who were friends of his.

“It’s dead,” he said.

“If I did, I would not have told you to come in,” she said.

The lights of the city had disappeared over the horizon. Seen from the darkened deck in the light of a full moon, the smooth, silent river and the pastureland on either bank became a phosphorescent plain. From time to time one could see a straw hut next to the great bonfires signaling that wood for the ships’ boilers was on sale. Florentino Ariza still had dim memories of the journey of his youth, and in dazzling flashes of lightning the sight of the river called them back to life as if they had happened yesterday. He recounted some of them to Fermina Daza in the belief that this might animate her, but she sat smoking in another world. Florentino Ariza renounced his memories and left her alone with hers, and in the meantime he rolled cigarettes and passed them to her already lit, until the box was empty. The music stopped after midnight, the voices of the passengers dispersed and broke into sleepy whispers, and two hearts, alone in the shadows on the deck, were beating in time to the breathing of the ship.

It had happened to him sometimes, and he had learned to live with the phantom: each time he had to learn again, as if it were the first time. He took her hand and laid it on his chest: Fermina Daza felt the old, untiring heart almost bursting through his skin, beating with the strength, the rapidity, the irregularity of an adolescent’s. He said: “Too much love is as bad for this as no love at all.” But he said it without conviction: he was ashamed, furious with himself, longing for some reason to blame her for his failure. She knew it, and began to provoke his defenseless body with mock caresses, like a kitten delighting in cruelty, until he could no longer endure the martyrdom and he returned to his cabin. She thought about him until dawn, convinced at last of her love, and as the anisette left her in slow waves, she was invaded by the anguished fear that he was angry and would never return.

“Well, then,” he said, “let’s do that.”

The two women who took care of him, and Florentino Ariza himself, were surprised at how much he had changed. Less than ten years before, he had assaulted one of the maids behind the main staircase in the house, dressed and standing as she was, and in less time than a Filipino rooster he had left her in a family way. He had to give her a furnished house in exchange for her swearing that the author of her dishonor was a part-time, Sunday sweetheart who had never even kissed her, and her father and uncles, who were proficient sugarcane cutters, forced them to marry.

They left their refuge as soon as the passengers disembarked. Fermina Daza breathed the good air of impunity in the empty salon, and from the gunwale they both watched a noisy crowd of people gathering their luggage in the cars of a train that looked like a toy. One would have thought they had come from Europe, above all the women, in their Nordic coats and hats from the last century that made no sense in the sweltering, dusty heat. Some wore beautiful potato blossoms in their hair, but they had begun to wither in the heat. They had just come from the Andean plateau after a train trip through a dreamlike savannah, and they had not had time to change their clothes for the Caribbean.

“Each time I pass that bank,” he said, “I pray to God that the gringo will board my ship so that I can leave him behind all over again.”

The idea came to him all at once as they were having supper in the private dining room. The Captain was troubled by a problem he had wanted to discuss for a long time with Florentino Ariza, who always evaded him with his usual answer: “Leona Cassiani can handle those problems better than I can.” This time, however, he listened to him. The fact was that the boats carried cargo upriver, but came back empty, while the opposite occurred with passengers. “And the advantage of cargo is that it pays more and eats nothing,” he said. Fermina Daza, bored with the men’s enervated discussion concerning the possibility of establishing differential fares, ate without will. But Florentino Ariza pursued the discussion to its end, and only then did he ask the question that the Captain thought was the prelude to a solution:

Then he began to tremble because he did not know where the letter was, and his nervous excitement was so great that he was sur-prised when he found it, for he did not remember placing it on the bed. Before opening it, he dried the envelope with his handkerchief, taking care not to smear the ink in which his name was written, and as he did so it occurred to him that the secret was no longer shared by two people but by three, at least, for whoever had delivered it must have noticed that only three weeks after the death of her husband, the Widow Urbino was writing to someone who did not belong to her world, and with so much urgency that she did not use the regular mails and so much secretiveness that she had ordered that it not be handed to anyone but slipped under the door instead, as if it were an anonymous letter. He did not have to tear open the envelope, for the water had dissolved the glue, but the letter was dry: three closely written pages with no salutation, and signed with the initials of her married name.

“You can take off your jacket,” she said to him.

It seemed incredible, but as the first anniversary of her husband’s death approached, Fermina Daza felt herself entering a place that was shady, cool, quiet: the grove of the irremediable. She was not yet aware, and would not be for several months, of how much the written meditations of Florentino Ariza had helped her to recover her peace of mind. Applied to her own experiences, they were what allowed her to understand her own life and to await the designs of old age with serenity. Their meeting at the memorial Mass was a providential opportunity for her to let Florentino Ariza know that she, too, thanks to his letters of encouragement, was prepared to erase the past.

“It is all the river we have left,” said the Captain.

It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them. There they were, precise, simple, just as she would have liked to say them, and once again she grieved that her husband was not alive to discuss them with her as they used to discuss certain events of the day before going to sleep. In this way an unknown Florentino Ariza was re-vealed to her, one possessed of a clear-sightedness that in no way corresponded to the feverish love letters of his youth or to the somber conduct of his entire life. They were, rather, the words of a man who, in the opinion of Aunt Escolástica, was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and this thought astounded her now as much as it had the first time. In any case, what most calmed her spirit was the certainty that this letter from a wise old man was not an attempt to repeat the impertinence of the night of the vigil over the body but a very noble way of erasing the past.

They were both intimi-dated, they could not understand what they were doing so far from their youth on a terrace with checkerboard tiles in a house that be-longed to no one and that was still redolent of cemetery flowers. It was the first time in half a century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity, and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. She thought that he would at last be convinced of the unreality of his dream, and that this would redeem his insolence.

The Captain said that it was possible, but only hypothetically. The R.C.C. had business commitments that Florentino Ariza was more familiar with than he was, it had contracts for cargo, passengers, mail, and a great deal more, and most of them were unbreakable. The only thing that would allow them to bypass all that was a case of cholera on board. The ship would be quarantined, it would hoist the yellow flag and sail in a state of emergency. Captain Samaritano had needed to do just that on several occasions because of the many cases of cholera along the river, although later the health authorities had obliged the doctors to sign death certificates that called the cases common dysentery. Besides, many times in the history of the river the yellow plague flag had been flown in order to evade taxes, or to avoid picking up an undesirable passenger, or to elude inopportune in-spections. Florentino Ariza reached for Fermina Daza’s hand under the table.

From the railing of the salon, Florentino Ariza watched them disembark. Just as he had hoped and wished, Dr. Urbino Daza and his wife turned to look at him before climbing into their automobile, and he waved his hand in farewell. They both responded in kind. He remained at the railing until the automobile disappeared in the dust of the freight yard, and then he went to his cabin to change into clothing more suitable for his first dinner on board in the Captain’s private dining room.

Long before he became President of the R.C.C., Florentino Ariza had received alarming reports on the state of the river, but he barely read them. He would calm his associates: “Don’t worry, by the time the wood is gone there will be boats fueled by oil.” With his mind clouded by his passion for Fermina Daza, he never took the trouble to think about it, and by the time he realized the truth, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in a new river. Even in the days when the waters were at their best, the boats had to anchor at night, and then even the simple fact of being alive became unendur-able.

She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best. Still, no matter how hard she tried, she could not elude the presence of her dead husband: wherever she went, wherever she turned, no matter what she was doing, she would come across something of his that would remind her of him. For even though it seemed only decent and right to grieve for him, she also wanted to do everything possible not to wallow in her grief. And so she made the drastic decision to empty the house of everything that would remind her of her dead husband, which was the only way she could think of to go on living without him.

“Everything in the world has changed,” she said.

“Se?ora,” she said, “Don Florentino is here.”

Florentino Ariza was startled, because her words read a thought that had given him no peace since the beginning of the voyage home. Neither one could imagine being in any other home but the cabin, or eating in any other way but on the ship, or living any other life, for that would be alien to them forever. It was, indeed, like dying. He could not go back to sleep. He lay on his back in bed, his hands crossed behind his head. At a certain moment, the pangs of grief for América Vicu?a made him twist with pain, and he could not hold off the truth any longer: he locked himself in the bathroom and cried, slowly, until his last tear was shed. Only then did he have the courage to admit to himself how much he had loved her.

Fermina Daza could not understand how it had come to be there, and he could only understand it as a miracle of love. One morning, as he was cutting roses in his garden, Florentino Ariza could not resist the temptation of taking one to her on his next visit. It was a difficult problem in the language of flowers because she was a recent widow. A red rose, symbol of flaming passion, might offend her mourning. Yellow roses, which in another language were the flowers of good fortune, were an expression of jealousy in the common vocabulary. He had heard of the black roses of Turkey, which were perhaps the most appropriate, but he had not been able to obtain any for acclimatization in his patio. After much thought he risked a white rose, which he liked less than the others because it was insipid and mute: it did not say anything. At the last minute, in case Fermina Daza was suspicious enough to attribute some meaning to it, he removed the thorns.

He had lost all track of time, and did not know where he was when he awoke facing a large, dazzling window. The voice of América Vicu?a playing ball in the garden with the servant girls brought him back to reality: he was in his mother’s bed. He had kept her bedroom intact, and he would sleep there to feel less alone on the few occa-sions when he was troubled by his solitude. Across from the bed hung the large mirror from Don Sancho’s Inn, and he had only to see it when he awoke to see Fermina Daza reflected in its depths. He knew that it was Saturday, because that was the day the chauffeur picked up América Vicu?a at her boarding school and brought her back to his house. He realized that he had slept without knowing it, dreaming that he could not sleep, in a dream that had been disturbed by the wrathful face of Fermina Daza. He bathed, wondering what his next step should be, he dressed very slowly in his best clothing, he dabbed on cologne and waxed the ends of his white mustache, he left the bedroom, and from the second-floor hallway he saw the beautiful child in her uniform catching the ball with the grace that had made him tremble on so many Saturdays but this morning did not disquiet him in the least.

“Don’t do this to me, Doctor,” he begged. “Two months for me are like ten years for you.”

And so it was. He had written it the day before, in a terrible state of depression because he could not overcome the embarrassment of his first frustrated visit. In it he begged her pardon for the im-pertinence of attempting to visit her without first obtaining her permission, and he promised never to return. He had mailed it with-out thinking, and when he did have second thoughts it was too late to retrieve it. But he did not believe so many explanations were necessary, and he simply asked Fermina Daza please not to read the letter.

They called each other tú again, again they exchanged commen-taries on their lives as they had done once before in their letters, and again Florentino Ariza tried to move too quickly: he wrote her name with the point of a pin on the petals of a camellia and sent it to her in a letter. Two days later it was returned with no message. Fermina Daza could not help it: all that seemed like children’s games to her, most of all when Florentino Ariza insisted on evoking the afternoons of melancholy verses in the Park of the Evangels, the letters hidden along her route to school, the embroidery lessons under the almond trees. With sorrowing heart she reprimanded him in what appeared to be a casual question in the midst of other trivial remarks: “Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?”

She took him to the bedroom and, with the lights on, began to undress without false modesty. Florentino Ariza was on the bed, lying on his back and trying to regain control, once again not knowing what to do with the skin of the tiger he had slain. She said: “Don’t look.” He asked why without taking his eyes off the ceiling.

For Hildebranda it was impossible not to speak of Florentino Ariza, because she always identified his fate with her own. She evoked him as she evoked the day she had sent her first telegram, and she could never erase from her heart the memory of the sad little bird condemned to oblivion. For her part, Fermina had often seen him without speaking to him, of course, and she could not imagine that he had been her first love. She always heard news about him, as sooner or later she heard news about anyone of any significance in the city. It was said that he had not married because of his unusual habits, but she paid no attention to this, in part because she never paid attention to rumors, and in part because such things were said in any event about men who were above suspicion. On the other hand, it seemed strange to her that Florentino Ariza would persist in his mystic attire and his rare lotions, and that he would continue to be so enigmatic after making his way in life in so spectacular and honorable a manner. It was impossible for her to believe he was the same person, and she was always surprised when Hildebranda would sigh: “Poor man, how he must have suffered!” For she had seen him without grief for a long time: a shadow that had been obliterated.

It was a ritual of eradication. Her son agreed to take his library so that she could replace his office with the sewing room she had never had when she was married. And her daughter would take some furniture and countless objects that she thought were just right for the antique auctions in New Orleans. All of this was a relief for Fermina Daza, although she was not at all amused to learn that the things she had bought on her honeymoon were now relics for anti-quarians. To the silent stupefaction of the servants, the neighbors, the women friends who came to visit her during that time, she had a bon-fire built in a vacant lot behind the house, and there she burned every-thing that reminded her of her husband: the most expensive and elegant clothes seen in the city since the last century, the finest shoes, the hats that resembled him more than his portraits, the siesta rocking chair from which he had arisen for the last time to die, innumerable objects so tied to her life that by now they formed part of her iden-tity.

Fermina Daza preferred to take refuge in her cabin. She had not said a word for the entire evening, and Florentino Ariza allowed her to remain lost in her thoughts. He interrupted her only to say good night outside her cabin, but she was not tired, just a little chilly, and she suggested that they sit for a while on her private deck to watch the river. Florentino Ariza wheeled two wicker easy chairs to the railing, turned off the lights, placed a woolen shawl around her shoulders, and sat down beside her. With surprising skill, she rolled a cigarette from the little box of tobacco that he had brought her. She smoked it slowly, with the lit end inside her m九-九-藏-书-网outh, not speaking, and then she rolled another two and smoked them one right after the other. Sip by sip, Florentino Ariza drank two thermoses of mountain coffee.

He had the good sense not to expect an immediate reply, to be satisfied if the letter was not returned to him. It was not, nor were any of the ones that followed, and as the days passed, his excitement grew, for the more days that passed without her letters being re-turned, the greater his hope of a reply. In the beginning, the frequency of his letters was conditioned by the dexterity of his fingers: first one a week, then two, and at last one a day. He was happy about the progress made in the mail service since his days as a standard-bearer, for he would not have risked being seen every day in the post office mailing a letter to the same person, or sending it with someone who might talk. On the other hand, it was very easy to send an employee to buy enough stamps for a month, and then slip the letter into one of the three mailboxes located in the old city.

“The only thing that hurts me is that I do not have the strength to give you the beating you deserve for being insolent and evil-minded,” she said. “But you will leave this house right now, and I swear to you on my mother’s grave that you will not set foot in it again as long as I live.”

Her expression--she who was no longer surprised at anything--was one of genuine surprise.

One day, at the height of desperation, she had shouted at him: “You don’t understand how unhappy I am.” Unperturbed, he took off his eyeglasses with a characteristic gesture, he flooded her with the transparent waters of his childlike eyes, and in a single phrase he burdened her with the weight of his unbearable wisdom: “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.” With the first loneliness of her widowhood she had understood that the phrase did not conceal the miserable threat that she had attributed to it at the time, but was the lodestone that had given them both so many happy hours.

Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza remained on the bridge until it was time for lunch. It was served a short while after they passed the town of Calamar on the opposite shore, which just a few years before had celebrated a perpetual fiesta and now was a ruined port with deserted streets. The only creature they saw from the boat was a woman dressed in white, signaling to them with a handkerchief. Fermina Daza could not understand why she was not picked up when she seemed so distressed, but the Captain explained that she was the ghost of a drowned woman whose deceptive signals were intended to lure ships off course into the dangerous whirlpools along the other bank. They passed so close that Fermina Daza saw her in sharp detail in the sunlight, and she had no doubt that she did not exist, but her face seemed familiar.

“Thank you for coming.”

Despite her unimpeachable life, Fermina Daza was more careful now than ever of everything she said or did, even with her closest friends. So that she maintained her connection to Florentino Ariza by means of the anachronistic thread of letters. The correspondence back and forth became so frequent and intense that he forgot about his leg and the chastisement of the bed, he forgot about everything, and he dedicated himself totally to writing on the kind of portable table used in hospitals to serve meals to patients.

Fermina Daza had spent the entire afternoon wondering what stratagems Florentino Ariza would use to see her without knocking at her cabin door, and by eight o’clock she could no longer bear the longing to be with him. She went out into the passageway, hoping to meet him in what would seem a casual encounter, and she did not have to go very far: Florentino Ariza was sitting on a bench in the passageway, as silent and forlorn as he had been in the Park of the Evangels, and for over two hours he had been asking himself how he was going to see her. They both made the same gesture of surprise that they both knew was feigned, and together they strolled the first-class deck, crowded with young people, most of them boisterous students who, with some eagerness, were exhausting them-selves in the final fling of their vacation. In the lounge, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza sat at the bar as if they were students themselves and drank bottled soft drinks, and suddenly she saw her-self in a frightening situation. She said: “How awful!” Florentino Ariza asked her what she was thinking that caused her so much distress.

Those weeks had been agonizing for Florentino Ariza as well. The night he reiterated his love to Fermina Daza he had wandered aimlessly through streets that had been devastated by the afternoon flood, asking himself in terror what he was going to do with the skin of the tiger he had just killed after having resisted its attacks for more than half a century. The city was in a state of emergency be-cause of the violent rains. In some houses, half-naked men and women were trying to salvage whatever God willed from the flood, and Florentino Ariza had the impression that everyone’s calamity had something to do with his own. But the wind was calm and the stars of the Caribbean were quiet in their places. In the sudden silence of other voices, Florentino Ariza recognized the voice of the man whom Leona Cassiani and he had heard singing many years before, at the same hour and on the same corner: I came back from the bridge bathed in tears. A song that in some way, on that night, for him alone, had something to do with death.

Her daughter Ofelia spent three months with her and then re-turned to New Orleans. Her son brought his family to lunch on Sundays and as often as he could during the week. Fermina Daza’s closest friends began to visit her once she had overcome the crisis of her mourning, they played cards facing the bare patio, they tried out new recipes, they brought her up to date on the secret life of the insatiable world that continued to exist without her. One of the most faithful was Lucrecia del Real del Obispo, an aristocrat of the old school who had always been a good friend and who drew even closer after the death of Juvenal Urbino. Stiff with arthritis and repenting her wayward life, in those days Lucrecia del Real not only provided her with the best company, she also consulted with her regarding the civic and secular projects that were being arranged in the city, and this made her feel useful for her own sake and not because of the protective shadow of her husband. And yet she was never so closely identified with him as she was then, for she was no longer called by her maiden name, and she became known as the Widow Urbino.

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

When the final warning sounded, Dr. Urbino Daza and his wife bade her an undramatic goodbye, and Florentino Ariza accompanied them to the gangplank. Dr. Urbino Daza tried to stand aside so that Florentino Ariza could follow his wife, and only then did he realize that Florentino Ariza was also taking the trip. Dr. Urbino Daza could not hide his confusion.

He left well after six o’clock, as they were beginning to turn on the lights in the house. He felt more secure but did not have many illusions, because he could not forget Fermina Daza’s fickle character and unpredictable reactions at the age of twenty, and he had no reason to think that she had changed. Therefore he risked asking, with sincere humility, if he might return another day, and once again her reply took him by surprise.

He suffered less from the deadly griping of his bowels than from the thought that she might hear them bubbling. But he managed to endure just an instant longer to say no, he had only passed by to ask her when he might visit. Still standing, she said to him in con-fusion: “Well, you are here now.” And she invited him to the terrace in the patio, where it was cooler. He refused in a voice that seemed to her like a sigh of sorrow.

“Because you won’t like it,” she said.

One Saturday afternoon, Florentino Ariza found her trying to type in his bedroom, and she was doing rather well, for she was study-ing typing at school. She had completed more than half a page of automatic writing, but it was not difficult to isolate an occasional phrase that revealed her state of mind. Florentino Ariza leaned over her shoulder to read what she had written. She was disturbed by his man’s heat, by his ragged breathing, by the scent on his clothes, which was the same as the scent on his pillow. She was no longer the little girl, the newcomer, whom he had undressed, one article of clothing at a time, with little baby games: first these little shoes for the little baby bear, then this little chemise for the little puppy dog, next these little flowered panties for the little bunny rabbit, and a little kiss on her papa’s delicious little dickey-bird. No: now she was a full-fledged woman, who liked to take the initiative.

Through almost the entire ceremony, Fermina Daza stood in the family pew in front of the main altar, as elegant as when she attended the opera. But when it was over, she broke with convention and did not stay in her seat, according to the custom of the day, to receive the spiritual renewal of condolences, but made her way instead through the crowd to thank each one of the guests: an innovative ges-ture that was very much in harmony with her style and character. Greeting one guest after another, she at last reached the pews of the poor relations, and then she looked around to make certain she had not missed anyone she knew. At that moment Florentino Ariza felt a supernatural wind lifting him out of himself: she had seen him. Fermina Daza moved away from her companions with the same assur-ance she brought to everything in society, held out her hand, and with a very sweet smile, said to him:

“Do you want to be alone?” he asked.

But he returned the same day, refreshed and renewed, at the unusual hour of eleven o’clock, and he undressed in front of her with a certain ostentation. She was pleased to see him in the light just as she had imagined him in the darkness: an ageless man, with dark skin that was as shiny and tight as an opened umbrella, with no hair except for a few limp strands under his arms and at his groin. His guard was up, and she realized that he did not expose his weapon by accident, but displayed it as if it were a war trophy in order to give himself courage. He did not even give her time to take off the nightgown that she had put on when the dawn breeze began to blow, and his beginner’s haste made her shiver with compassion. But that did not disturb her, because in such cases it was not easy to distin-guish between compassion and love. When it was over, however, she felt empty.

For the first three days Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza were protected by the soft springtime of the enclosed observation deck, but when the wood was rationed and the cooling system began to fail, the Presidential Suite became a steam bath. She survived the nights because of the river breeze that came in through the open windows, and she frightened off the mosquitoes with a towel because the insecticide bomb was useless when the boat was anchored. Her earache had become unbearable, and one morning when she awoke it stopped suddenly and completely, like the sound of a smashed cicada. But she did not realize that she had lost the hearing in her left ear until that night, when Florentino Ariza spoke to her on that side and she had to turn her head to hear what he was saying. She did not tell anyone, for she was resigned to the fact that it was one of the many irremediable defects of old age.

“Be careful, we have no rubbers.”

It said that during one of the many civil wars of the last century, Lorenzo Daza had been the intermediary between the government of the Liberal President Aquileo Parra and one Joseph T. K. Korzeniowski, a native of Poland and a member of the crew of the mer-chant ship Saint Antoine, sailing under the French flag, who had spent several months here trying to conclude a complicated arms deal. Korzeniowski, who later became famous as Joseph Conrad, made contact somehow with Lorenzo Daza, who bought the shipment of arms from him on behalf of the government, with his credentials and his receipts in order and the purchase price in gold. According to the story in the newspaper, Lorenzo Daza claimed that the arms had been stolen in an improbable raid, and then he sold them again, for twice their value, to the Conservatives who were at war with the government.

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

“I’ve remained a virgin for you.”

Florentino Ariza explained that those were all legends from an-other time: these days the riverboats had ballrooms and cabins as spacious and luxurious as hotel rooms, with private baths and electric fans, and there had been no armed attacks since the last civil war. He also explained, with the satisfaction of a personal triumph, that these advances were due more than anything else to the freedom of navigation that he had fought for and which had stimulated compe-tition: instead of a single company, as in the past, there were now three, which were very active and prosperous. Nevertheless, the rapid progress of aviation was a real threat to all of them. She tried to console him: boats would always exist because there were not many people crazy enough to get into a contraption that seemed to go against nature. Then Florentino Ariza spoke of improvements in mail service, transportation as well as delivery, in an effort to have her talk about his letters. But he was not successful.

She ignored his hidden intentions and returned the letter to him, saying: “It is a shame that I cannot read it, because the others have helped me a great deal.” He took a deep breath, astounded that she had said so much more than he had hoped for in so spontaneous a manner, and he said: “You cannot imagine how happy I am to know that.” But she changed the subject, and he could not manage to bring it up again for the rest of the afternoon.

She had new reasons for being grateful to Florentino Ariza, be-cause in response to the infamous stories, he had written Justice an exemplary letter concerning the ethical responsibilities of the press and respect for other people’s honor. They did not publish it, but the author sent a copy to the Commercial Daily, the oldest and most serious newspaper along the Caribbean coast, which featured the letter on the front page. Signed with the pseudonym “Jupiter,” it was so reasoned, incisive, and well written that it was attributed to some of the most notable writers in the province. It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance. Fermina Daza knew who the author was without having to be told, because she recognized some of the ideas and even a sentence taken directly from Florentino Ariza’s moral reflections. And so she received him with renewed affection in the disarray of her solitude. It was at this time that América Vicu?a found herself alone one Saturday afternoon in the bedroom on the Street of Windows, and without looking for them, by sheer accident, she found the typed copies of the meditations of Florentino Ariza and the handwritten letters of Fermina Daza, in a wardrobe without a key.

Then he reached out with two icy fingers in the darkness, felt for the other hand in the darkness, and found it waiting for him. Both were lucid enough to realize, at the same fleeting instant, that the hands made of old bones were not the hands they had imagined before touching. In the next moment, however, they were. She began to speak of her dead husband in the present tense, as if he were alive, and Florentino Ariza knew then that for her, too, the time had come to ask herself with dignity, with majesty, with an irrepressible desire to live, what she should do with the love that had been left behind without a master.

There was no power that could dissuade her. Ofelia went to live in her brother’s house, and from there she sent all kinds of petitions with distinguished emissaries. But it was in vain. Neither the media-tion of her son nor the intervention of her friends could break Fermina Daza’s resolve. At last, in the colorful language of her better days, she allowed herself to confide in her daughter-in-law, with whom she had always maintained a certain plebeian camaraderie. “A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old.” She lit a cigarette with the end of the one she was smoking, and then she gave vent to all the poison that was gnawing at her insides.

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

“There’s no problem,” the Captain laughed. “In a few years, we’ll ride the dry riverbed in luxury automobiles.”

Fermina Daza stopped smoking in order not to let go of the hand that was still in hers. She was lost in her longing to understand. She could not conceive of a husband better than hers had been, and yet when she recalled their life she found more difficulties than pleasures, too many mutual misunderstandings, useless arguments, unresolved angers. Suddenly she sighed: “It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.” By the time she finished unburdening herself, someone had turned off the moon. The boat moved ahead at its steady pace, one foot in front of the other: an immense, watchful animal. Fermina Daza had returned from her longing.

When they went up, already dressed for going ashore, the ship had left behind the narrow channels and marshes of the old Spanish passage and was navigating around the wrecks of boats and the plat-forms of oil wells in the bay. A radiant Thursday was breaking over the golden domes of the city of the Viceroys, but Fermina Daza, standing at the railing, could not bear the pestilential stink of its glories, the arrogance of its bulwarks profaned by iguanas: the horror of real life. They did not say anything, but neither one felt capable of capitulating so easily.

“Go now,” she said.

It did not seem possible that this could be the same man, this man handled front and back by two women who just a few months earlier had made him tremble with love and who now soaped him above his waist and below, dried him with towels of Egyptian cotton, and massaged his entire body, while he did not emit a single sigh of passion. Each of them had a different explanation for his lack of desire. Leona Cassiani thought it was the prelude to death. América Vicu?a at-tributed it to a hidden cause whose intricacies she could not decipher. He alone knew the truth, and it had its own name. In any case, it was unfair: they suffered more in serving him than he did in being so well served.

From there he saw Fermina Daza walk in on her son’s arm, dressed in an unadorned long-sleeved black velvet dress buttoned all the way from her neck to the tips of her shoes, like a bishop’s cassock, and a narrow scarf of Castilian lace instead of the veiled hat worn by other widows, and even by many other ladies who longed for that condition. Her uncovered face shone like alabaster, her lanceolate eyes had a life of their own under the enormous chandeliers of the central nave, and as she walked she was so erect, so haughty, so self-possessed, that she seemed no older than her son. As he stood, Florentino Ariza leaned the tips of his fingers against the back of the pew until his dizziness passed, for he felt that he and she were not separated by seven paces, but existed in two different times.

The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was over-whelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

That first year had been enough time for her to adjust to her widowhood. The purified memory of her husband, no longer an obstacle in her daily actions, in her private thoughts, in her simplest intentions, became a watchful presence that guided but did not hinder her. On the occasions when she truly needed him she would see him, not as an apparition but as flesh and blood. She was encouraged by the certainty that he was there, still alive but without his masculine whims, his patriarchal demands, his consuming need for her to love him in the same ritual of inopportune kisses and tender words with which he loved her. For now she understood him better than when he was alive, she understood the yearning of his love, the urgent need he felt to find in her the security that seemed to be the mainstay of his public life and that in reality he never possessed.

Dr. Urbino Daza was happy about the resumption of the visits that gave so much encouragement to his mother. But Ofelia, his sister, came from New Orleans on the first fruit boat as soon as she heard that Fermina Daza had a strange friendship with a man whose moral qualifications were not the best. Her alarm grew to critical proportions during the first week, when she became aware of the familiarity and self-possession with which Florentino Ariza came into the house, and the whispers and fleeting lovers’ quarrels that filled their visits until all hours of the night. What for Dr. Urbino Daza was a healthy affection between two lonely old people was for her a vice-ridden form of secret concubinage.

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

She heard him leave in the darkness, she heard his steps on the stairs, she heard him cease to exist until the next day. Fermina Daza lit another cigarette, and as she smoked she saw Dr. Juvenal Urbino in his immaculate linen suit, with his professional rigor, his dazzling charm, his official love, and he tipped his white hat in a gesture of farewell from another boat out of the past. “We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice,” he had once said to her. “But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.” Fermina Daza sat motionless until dawn, thinking about Florentino Ariza, not as the desolate sentinel in the little Park of the Evangels, whose memory did not awaken even a spark of nostalgia in her, but as he was now, old and lame, but real: the man who had always been within reach and whom she could never acknowledge. As the breathing boat carried her toward the splendor of the day’s first roses, all that she asked of God was that Florentino Ariza would know how to begin again the next day.

These were not the last tears that Fermina Daza was going to hold back. Florentino Ariza had not yet finished his sixty days of seclusion when Justice published a front-page story, complete with photo-graphs of the two protagonists, about the alleged secret love affair between Dr. Juvenal Urbino and Lucrecia del Real del Obispo. There was speculation on the details of their relationship, the fre-quency of their meetings and how they were arranged, and the complicity of her husband, who was given to excesses of sodomy with the blacks on his sugar plantation. The story, published in enormous block letters in an ink the color of blood, fell like a thundering cataclysm on the enfeebled local aristocracy. Not a line of it was true: Juvenal Urbino and Lucrecia del Real had been close friends in the days when they were both single, and they had continued their friendship after their marriages, but they had never been lovers. In any case, it did not seem that the purpose of the story was to sully the name of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, whose memory enjoyed universal respect, but to injure the husband of Lucrecia del Real, who had been elected President of the Social Club the week before. The scandalous story was suppressed in a few hours. But Lucrecia del Real did not visit Fermina Daza again, and Fermina Daza in-terpreted this as a confession of guilt.

They lay on their backs for a long time, he more and more perturbed as his intoxication left him, and she peaceful, almost with-out will, but praying to God that she would not laugh like a fool, as she always did when she overindulged in anisette. They talked to pass the time. They spoke of themselves, of their divergent lives, of the incredible coincidence of their lying naked in a dark cabin on a stranded boat when reason told them they had time only for death. She had never heard of his having a woman, not even one, in that city where everything was known even before it happened. She spoke in a casual manner, and he replied without hesitation in a steady voice:

After the first month he began to number the letters and to head them with a synopsis of the previous ones, as in the serialized novels in the newspapers, for fear that Fermina Daza would not realize that they had a certain continuity. When they became daily letters, more-over, he replaced the envelopes that had mourning vignettes with long white envelopes, and this gave them the added impersonality of busi-ness letters. When he began, he was prepared to subject his patience to a crucial test, at least until he had proof that he was wasting his time with the only new approach he could think of. He waited, in fact, not with the many kinds of suffering that waiting had caused him in his youth, but with the stubbornness of an old man made of stone who had nothing else to think about, nothing else to do in a riverboat company that by this time was sailing without his help before favor-able winds, and who was also convi藏书网nced that he would be alive and in perfect possession of his male faculties the next day, or the day after that, or whenever Fermina Daza at last was convinced that there was no other remedy for her solitary widow’s yearnings than to lower the drawbridge for him.

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

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

When in fact the day arrived, she took possession of the Presi-dential Suite as its lady and mistress. The ship’s Captain honored Dr. Urbino Daza and his wife, and Florentino Ariza, with champagne and smoked salmon. His name was Diego Samaritano, he wore a white linen uniform that was absolutely correct, from the tips of his boots to his cap with the R.C.C. insignia embroidered in gold thread, and he possessed, in common with other river captains, the stoutness of a ceiba tree, a peremptory voice, and the manners of a Florentine cardinal.

He was there. Fermina Daza’s first reaction was panic. She thought no, he should come back another day at a more appropriate hour, she was in no condition to receive visitors, there was nothing to talk about. But she recovered instantly and told her to show him into the drawing room and bring him coffee, while she tidied herself before seeing him. Florentino Ariza had waited at the street door, burning under the infernal three o’clock sun, but in full control of the situation. He was prepared not to be received, even with an amiable excuse, and that certainty kept him calm. But the decisiveness of her message shook him to his very marrow, and when he walked into the cool shadows of the drawing room he did not have time to think about the miracle he was experiencing because his intestines suddenly filled in an explosion of painful foam. He sat down, holding his breath, hounded by the damnable memory of the bird droppings on his first love letter, and he remained motionless in the shadowy darkness until the first attack of shivering had passed, resolved to accept any mishap at that moment except this unjust misfortune.

It was soon obvious, however, that Fermina Daza was not im-mune to the hazards of her class. Justice attacked her one weak flank: her father’s business. When he was forced into exile, she knew of only one instance of his shady dealings, which had been told to her by Gala Placidia. Later, when Dr. Urbino confirmed the story after his interview with the Governor, she was convinced that her father had been the victim of slander. The facts were that two government agents had come to the house on the Park of the Evangels with a warrant, searched it from top to bottom without finding what they were looking for, and at last ordered the wardrobe with the mirrored doors in Fermina Daza’s old bedroom to be opened. Gala Placidia, who was alone in the house and lacked the means to stop anyone from doing anything, refused to open it, with the excuse that she did not have the keys. Then one of the agents broke the mirror on the door with the butt of his revolver and found the space between the glass and the wood stuffed with counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.

In January 1824, Commodore Johann Bernard Elbers, the father of river navigation, had registered the first steamboat to sail the Magdalena River, a primitive old forty-horsepower wreck named Fidelity. More than a century later, one seventh of July at six o’clock in the evening, Dr. Urbino Daza and his wife accompanied Fermina Daza as she boarded the boat that was to carry her on her first river voyage. It was the first vessel built in the local shipyards and had been christened New Fidelity in memory of its glorious ancestor. Fermina Daza could never believe that so significant a name for them both was indeed a historical coincidence and not another conceit born of Florentino Ariza’s chronic romanticism.

She was ready at eleven o’clock, bathed and smelling of flower-scented soap, wearing a very simple widow’s dress of gray etamine, and completely recovered from the night’s turmoil. She ordered a sober breakfast from the steward, who was dressed in impeccable white, and in the Captain’s personal service, but she did not send a message for anyone to come for her. She went up alone, dazzled by the cloudless sky, and she found Florentino Ariza talking to the Captain on the bridge. He looked different to her, not only because she saw him now with other eyes, but because in reality he had changed. Instead of the funereal clothing he had worn all his life, he was dressed in comfortable white shoes, slacks, and a linen shirt with an open collar, short sleeves, and his monogram embroidered on the breast pocket. He also had on a white Scottish cap and re-movable dark lenses over his perpetual eyeglasses for myopia.

Fermina Daza did not care to eat because of the pain in her ear, and she watched as the first load of wood for the boilers was taken on from a bare gully where there was nothing but stacked logs and a very old man who supervised the operation. There did not seem to be another person for many leagues around. For Fermina Daza it was a long, tedious stop that would have been unthinkable on the ocean liners to Europe, and the heat was so intense that she could feel it even on her cooled observation deck. But when the boat weighed anchor again there was a cool breeze scented with the heart of the forest, and the music became more lively. In the town of Sitio Nuevo there was only one light in only one window in only one house, and the port office did not signal either cargo or passengers, so the boat passed by without a greeting.

For she had not only received his letters, she had read them with great interest and had found in them serious and thoughtful reasons to go on living. She had been at the table, having breakfast with her daughter, when she received the first one. She opened it because of the novelty of its being typewritten, and a sudden blush burned her face when she recognized the initial of the signature. But she immediately regained her self-possession and put the letter in her apron pocket. She said: “It is a condolence letter from the government.” Her daughter was surprised: “All of them came already.” She was imper-turbable: “This is another one.” Her intention was to burn the letter later, when she was away from her daughter’s questions, but she could not resist the temptation of looking it over first. She expected the reply that her insulting letter deserved, a letter that she began to regret the very moment she sent it, but from the majestic salutation and the subject of the first paragraph, she realized that something had changed in the world. She was so intrigued that she locked herself in her bedroom to read it at her ease before she burned it, and she read it three times without pausing.

During the day they played cards, ate until they were bursting, took gritty siestas that left them exhausted, and as soon as the sun was down the orchestra began to play, and they had anisette with salmon until they could eat and drink no more. It was a rapid journey: the boat was light and the currents favorable and even improved by the floods that rushed down from the headwaters, where it rained as much that week as it had during the entire voyage. Some villages fired charitable cannons for them to frighten away the cholera, and they expressed their gratitude with a mournful bellow. The ships they passed on the way, regardless of the company they belonged to, signaled their condolences. In the town of Magangué, where Mer-cedes was born, they took on enough wood for the rest of the trip.

The Captain, standing on the bridge, shouted his answers to the questions put to him by the armed patrol. They wanted to know what kind of pestilence they carried on board, how many passengers there were, how many of them were sick, what possibility there was for new infections. The Captain replied that they had only three passengers on board and all of them had cholera, but they were being kept in strict seclusion. Those who were to come on board in La Dorada, and the twenty-seven men of the crew, had not had any contact with them. But the commander of the patrol was not satisfied, and he ordered them to leave the bay and wait in Las Mercedes Marsh until two o’clock in the afternoon, while the forms were prepared for placing the ship in quarantine. The Captain let loose with a wagon driver’s fart, and with a wave of his hand he ordered the pilot to turn around and go back to the marshes.

Nevertheless, on the afternoon when he returned from lunch with Dr. Urbino Daza, after the aperitif of port and half a glass of red wine with the meal, and above all after their triumphal conversation, he tried to reach the third stair with so youthful a dance step that he twisted his left ankle, fell backward, and only by a miracle did not kill himself. As he was falling he had enough lucidity to think that he was not going to die of this accident because the logic of life would not allow two men, who had loved the same woman so much for so many years, to die in the same way within a year of each other. He was right. He was put into a plaster cast from his foot to his calf and forced to remain immobile in bed, but he was livelier than he had been before his fall. When the doctor ordered sixty days of convalescence, he could not believe his misfortune.

“Well, I might just do that,” she said.

The effect on her was even more devastating when Lucrecia del Real told her the complete story, which had been published in a local newspaper. The police had discovered that the elderly couple beaten to death were clandestine lovers who had taken their vacations together for forty years, but who each had a stable and happy marriage as well as very large families. Fermina Daza, who never cried over the soap operas on the radio, had to hold back the knot of tears that choked her. In his next letter, without any comment, Florentino Ariza sent her the news item that he had cut out of the paper.

Florentino Ariza showed him the key to his cabin with too evident an intention: an ordinary cabin on the common deck. But to Dr. Urbino Daza this did not seem sufficient proof of innocence. He glanced at his wife in consternation, with the eyes of a drowning man looking for support, but her eyes were ice. She said in a very low, harsh voice: “You too?” Yes: he too, like his sister Ofelia, thought there was an age at which love began to be indecent. But he was able to recover in time, and he said goodbye to Florentino Ariza with a handshake that was more resigned than grateful.

Florentino Ariza had foreseen how things would be that night, and he withdrew. At the door of her cabin he tried to kiss her good night, but she offered him her left cheek. He insisted, with labored breath, and she offered him her other cheek, with a coquettishness that he had not known when she was a schoolgirl. Then he insisted again, and she offered him her lips, she offered her lips with a profound trembling that she tried to suppress with the laugh she had forgotten after her wedding night.

In order to avoid uncomfortable silences or undesirable subjects, she asked obvious questions about riverboats. It seemed incredible that he, the owner, had only traveled the river once, many years ago, before he had anything to do with the company. She did not know his reasons, and he would have been willing to sell his soul if he could have told them to her. She did not know the river either. Her husband had an aversion to the air of the Andes that he concealed with a variety of excuses: the dangers to the heart of the altitude, the risks of pneumonia, the duplicity of the people, the injustices of centralism. And so they knew half the world, but they did not know their own country. Nowadays there was a Junkers seaplane that flew from town to town along the basin of the Magdalena like an aluminum grasshopper, with two crew members, six passengers, and many sacks of mail. Florentino Ariza commented: “It is like a flying coffin.” She had been on the first balloon flight and had experienced no fear, but she could hardly believe that she was the same person who had dared such an adventure. She said: “Things have changed.” Meaning that she was the one who had changed, and not the means of transportation.

On the first anniversary of the death of Juvenal Urbino, the family sent out invitations to a memorial Mass at the Cathedral. Florentino Ariza had still received no reply, and this was the driving force behind his bold decision to attend the Mass although he had not been invited. It was a social event more ostentatious than emotional. The first few rows of pews were reserved for their lifetime owners, whose names were engraved on copper nameplates on the backs of their seats. Florentino Ariza was among the first to arrive so that he might sit where Fermina Daza could not pass by without seeing him. He thought that the best seats would be in the central nave, behind the reserved pews, but there were so many people he could not find a seat there either, and he had to sit in the nave for poor relations.

“From the moment I was born,” said Florentino Ariza, “I have never said anything I did not mean.”

They awoke at six o’clock. She had a headache scented with anisette, and her heart was stunned by the impression that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had come back, plumper and younger than when he had fallen from the tree, and that he was sitting in his rocking chair, waiting for her at the door of their house. She was, however, lucid enough to realize that this was the result not of the anisette but of her imminent return.

She took such a liking to the soap operas from Santiago de Cuba that she waited with impatience for each day’s new episode. From time to time she listened to the news to find out what was going on in the world, and on the few occasions when she was alone in the house she would turn the volume very low and listen to distant, clear merengues from Santo Domingo and plenas from Puerto Rico. One night, on an unknown station that suddenly came in as strong and clear as if it were next door, she heard heartbreaking news: an elderly couple, who for forty years had been repeating their honey-moon every year in the same spot, had been murdered, bludgeoned to death with oars by the skipper of the boat they were riding in, who then robbed them of all the money they were carrying: fourteen dollars.

He knew himself well: despite his congenital constipation, his belly had betrayed him in public three or four times in the course of his many years, and those three or four times he had been obliged to give in. Only on those occasions, and on others of equal urgency, did he realize the truth of the words that he liked to repeat in jest: “I do not believe in God, but I am afraid of Him.” He did not have time for doubts: he tried to say any prayer he could remember, but he could not think of a single one. When he was a boy, another boy had taught him magic words for hitting a bird with a stone: “Aim, aim, got my aim--if I miss you I’m not to blame.” He used it when he went to the country for the first time with a new slingshot, and the bird fell down dead.

Fermina Daza needed no more than three Tuesdays to realize how much she missed Florentino Ariza’s visits. She enjoyed the friends who were frequent visitors, and she enjoyed them even more as time distanced her from her husband’s habits. Lucrecia del Real del Obispo had gone to Panama to have her ear examined be-cause of a pain that nothing could ease, and after a month she came back feeling much better, but hearing less than she had before and using an ear trumpet. Fermina Daza was the friend who was most tolerant of her confusions of questions and answers, and this was so encouraging to Lucrecia that hardly a day went by that she did not stop in at any hour. But for Fermina Daza no one could take the place of her calming afternoons with Florentino Ariza.

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

“By now it does not matter,” she said. “I have just turned seventy-two.”

The mortal rage of the first shock remained intact after the sym-bolic cremation of her husband, and it grew and spread as she felt herself less capable of controlling it. Even worse: the spaces in her mind where she managed to appease her memories of the dead man were slowly but inexorably being taken over by the field of poppies where she had buried her memories of Florentino Ariza. And so she thought about him without wanting to, and the more she thought about him the angrier she became, and the angrier she became the more she thought about him, until it was something so unbearable that her mind could no longer contain it. Then she sat down at her dead husband’s desk and wrote Florentino Ariza a letter consisting of three irrational pages so full of insults and base provocations that it brought her the consolation of consciously committing the vilest act of her long life.

“I beg you, let it be tomorrow,” he said.

She insisted with so much vehemence on her determination to drive Florentino Ariza out of the house that it reached Fermina Daza’s ears. She called her to her bedroom, as she always did when she wanted to talk without being heard by the servants, and she asked her to repeat her accusations. Ofelia did not soften them: she was certain that Florentino Ariza, whose reputation as a pervert was known to everyone, was carrying on an equivocal relationship that did more harm to the family’s good name than the villainies of Lorenzo Daza or the ingenuous adventures of Juvenal Urbino. Fermina Daza listened to her without saying a word, without even blinking, but when she finished, Fermina Daza was another person: she had come back to life.

Leona Cassiani helped him to bathe and to change his pajamas every other day, she gave him his enemas, she held the portable urinal for him, she applied arnica compresses to the bedsores on his back, she gave him the massages recommended by the doctor so that his immobility would not cause other, more severe ailments. On Satur-days and Sundays she was relieved by América Vicu?a, who was to receive her teaching degree in December of that year. He had promised to send her to Alabama for further study, at the expense of the river company, in part to quiet his conscience and above all in order not to face either the reproaches that she did not know how to make to him or the explanations that he owed to her.

Justice also said that at the time that General Rafael Reyes founded the navy, Lorenzo Daza bought a shipment of surplus boots at a very low price from the English army, and with that one deal he doubled his fortune in six months. According to the newspaper, when the shipment reached this port, Lorenzo Daza refused to accept it because it contained only boots for the right foot, but he was the sole bidder when Customs auctioned it according to the law, and he bought it for the token sum of one hundred pesos. At the same time, under similar circumstances, an accomplice purchased the shipment of boots for the left foot that had reached Riohacha. Once they were in pairs, Lorenzo Daza took advantage of his relationship by marriage to the Urbino de la Calle family and sold the boots to the new navy at a profit of two thousand percent.

It was well received as a gift with no hidden intentions, and the Tuesday ritual was enriched, so that when he would arrive with the white rose, the vase filled with water was ready in the center of the tea table. One Tuesday, as he placed the rose in the vase, he said in an apparently casual manner:

“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked.

Later she re-proached him for his fruitless insistence on not permitting himself to grow old in a natural way. This was, according to her, the reason for his haste and constant blundering as he evoked the past. She could not understand how a man capable of the thoughts that had given her the strength to endure her widowhood could become entangled in so childish a manner when he attempted to apply them to his own life. Their roles were reversed. Now it was she who tried to give him new courage to face the future, with a phrase that he, in his reckless haste, could not decipher: Let time pass and we will see what it brings. For he was never as good a student as she was. His forced immobility, the growing lucidity of his conviction that time was fleeting, his mad desire to see her, everything proved to him that his fear of falling had been more accurate and more tragic than he had foreseen. For the first time, he began to think in a reasoned way about the reality of death.

She did it without the shadow of a doubt, in the full certainty that her husband would have approved, and not only for reasons of hygiene. For he had often expressed his desire to be cremated and not shut away in the seamless dark of a cedar box. His religion would not permit it, of course: he had dared to broach the subject with the Archbishop, just in case, and his answer had been a categorical no. It was pure illusion, because the Church did not permit the existence of crematoriums in our cemeteries, not even for the use of religions other than Catholic, and the advantage of building them would not have occurred to anyone but Juvenal Urbino. Fermina Daza did not forget her husband’s terror, and even in the confusion of the first hours she remembered to order the carpenter to leave a chink where light could come into the coffin as a consolation to him.

He tried to get up several times, holding his leg that was like a statue’s, with both hands, and reality always defeated him. But when at last he walked again, his ankle still painful and his back raw, he had more than enough reasons to believe that destiny had re-warded his perseverance with a providential fall.

Captain Samaritano had an almost maternal affection for the manatees, because they seemed to him like ladies damned by some extravagant love, and he believed the truth of the legend that they were the only females in the animal kingdom that had no mates. He had always opposed shooting at them from the ship, which was the custom despite the laws prohibiting it. Once, a hunter from North Carolina, his papers in order, had disobeyed him, and with a well-aimed bullet from his Springfield rifle had shattered the head of a manatee mother whose baby became frantic with grief as it wailed over the fallen body. The Captain had the orphan brought on board so that he could care for it, and left the hunter behind on the deserted bank, next to the corpse of the murdered mother. He spent six months in prison as the result of diplomatic protests and almost lost his navigator’s license, but he came out prepared to do it again, as often as the need arose. Still, that had been a historic episode: the orphaned manatee, which grew up and lived for many years in the rare-animal zoo in San Nicolás de las Barrancas, was the last of its kind seen along the river.

One night, as they were leaving the house together, Dr. Urbino Daza asked him to have lunch with him: “Tomorrow, at twelve-thirty, at the Social Club.” It was an exquisite dish served with a poisonous wine: the Social Club reserved the right to refuse admission for any number of reasons, and one of the most important was illegiti-mate birth. Uncle Leo XII had experienced great annoyance in this regard, and Florentino Ariza himself had suffered the humiliation of being asked to leave when he was already sitting at the table as the guest of one of the founding members, for whom Florentino Ariza had performed complex favors in the area of river commerce, and who had no other choice but to take him elsewhere to eat.

She continued typing with just one finger of her right hand, and with her left she felt for his leg, explored him, found him, felt him come to life, grow, heard him sigh with excitement, and his old man’s breathing became uneven and labored. She knew him: from that point on he was going to lose con-trol, his speech would become disjointed, he would be at her mercy, and he would not find his way back until he had reached the end. She led him by the hand to the bed as if he were a blind beggar on the street, and she cut him into pieces with malicious tenderness; she added salt to taste, pepper, a clove of garlic, chopped onion, lemon juice, bay leaf, until he was seasoned and on the platter, and the oven was heated to the right temperature. There was no one in the house. The servant girls had gone out, and the masons and carpenters who were renovating the house did not work on Saturdays: they had the whole world to themselves. But on the edge of the abyss he came out of his ecstasy, moved her hand away, sat up, and said in a tremu-lous voice:

It was at this time that Leona Cassiani celebrated her birthday and invited a small group of friends to her house. He was distracted and spilled chicken gravy on himself. She cleaned his lapel with the corner of his napkin dampened in a glass of water, and then she tied it around his neck like a bib to avoid a more serious accident: he looked like an old baby. She noticed that several times during dinner he took off his eyeglasses and dried them with his handkerchief because his eyes were watering. During coffee he fell asleep holding his cup in his hand, and she tried to take it away without waking him, but his embarrassed response was: “I was just resting my eyes.” Leona Cas-siani went to bed astounded at how his age was beginning to show.

“Not now,” she said to him. “I smell like an old woman.”

The Captain was taken by surprise, but then, with the instinct of an old fox, he saw everything clearly.

At the end of the third week, in fact, she began to see the first light. But as it grew larger and brighter, she became aware that there was an evil phantom in her life who did not give her a moment’s peace. He was not the pitiable phantom who had haunted her in the Park of the Evangels and whom she had evoked with a certain tenderness after she had grown old, but the hateful phantom with his execu-tioner’s frock coat and his hat held against his chest, whose thoughtless impertinence had disturbed her so much that she found it impossible not to think about him. Ever since her rejection of him at the age of eighteen, she had been convinced that she had left behind a seed of hatred in him that could only grow larger with time. She had always counted on that hatred, she had felt it in the air when the phantom was near, and the mere sight of him had upset and frightened her so that she never found a natural way to behave with him. On the night when he reiterated his love for her, while the flowers for her dead husband were still perfuming the house, she could not believe that his insolence was not the first step in God knows what sinister plan for revenge.