Juvenal Urbino for his final words in the event he perished during the adventure, and he did noteven take the time to think about the answer that would earn him so much abuse.
"In my opinion," he said, "the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us."Lost in the guileless crowd that sang the national anthem as the balloon gained altitude,Florentino Ariza felt himself in agreement with the person whose comments he heard over the din,to the effect that this was not a suitable exploit for a woman, least of all one as old as FerminaDaza. But it was not so dangerous after all. Or at least not so much dangerous as depressing. Theballoon reached its destination without incident after a peaceful trip through an incredible bluesky. They flew well and very low, with a calm, favourable wind, first along the spurs of the snow-covered mountains and then over the vastness of the Great Swamp.
From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic cityof Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because ofthe cholera panic after three centuries of resistance to the sieges of the English and the atrocities ofthe buccaneers. They saw the walls still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortificationsdevoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the Viceroys rotting withplague inside their armour.
They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colours, withpens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrinegardens. Excited by everyone's shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water,jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that theyhandled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottlesof cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to themfrom the basket of the balloon.
They flew over the dark ocean of the banana plantations, whose silence reached them like alethal vapour, and Fermina Daza remembered herself at the age of three, perhaps four, walkingthrough the shadowy forest holding the hand of her mother, who was almost a girl herself,surrounded by other women dressed in muslin, just like her mother, with white parasols and hatsmade of gauze. The pilot, who was observing the world through a spyglass, said: "They seemdead." He passed the spyglass to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who saw the oxcarts in the cultivated fields,the boundary lines of the railroad tracks, the blighted irrigation ditches, and wherever he looked hesaw human bodies. Someone said that the cholera was ravaging the villages of the Great Swamp.
Dr. Urbino, as he spoke, continued to look through the spyglass.
"Well, it must be a very special form of cholera," he said, "because every single corpse hasreceived the coup de grace through the back of the neck."A short while later they flew over a foaming sea, and they landed without incident on abroad, hot beach whose surface, cracked with niter burned like fire. The officials were there withno more protection against the sun than ordinary umbrellas, the elementary schools were therewaving little flags in time to the music, and the beauty queens with scorched flowers and crownsmade of gold cardboard, and the brass band of the prosperous town of Gayra, which in those dayswas the best along the Caribbean coast. All that Fermina Daza wanted was to see her birthplaceagain, to confront it with her earliest memories, but no one was allowed to go there because of thedangers of the plague. Dr. Juvenal Urbino delivered the historic letter, which was then mislaidamong other papers and never seen again, and the entire delegation almost suffocated in thetedium of the speeches. The pilot could not make the balloon ascend again, and at last they wereled on muleback to the dock at Pueblo Viejo, where the swamp met the sea. Fermina Daza wassure she had passed through there with her mother when she was very young, in a cart drawn by ateam of oxen. When she was older, she had repeated the story several times to her father, who diedinsisting that she could not possibly recall that.
"I remember the trip very well, and what you say is accurate," he told her, "but it happened atleast five years before you were born."Three days later the members of the balloon expedition, devastated by a bad night of storms,returned to their port of origin, where they received a heroes' welcome. Lost in the crowd, ofcourse, was Florentino Ariza, who recognised the traces of terror on Fermina Daza's face.
Nevertheless he saw her again that same afternoon in a cycling exhibition that was also sponsoredby her husband, and she showed no sign of fatigue. She rode an uncommon velocipede thatresembled something from a circus, with a very high front wheel, over which she was seated, anda very small back wheel that gave almost no support. She wore a pair of loose trousers trimmed inred, which scandalised the older ladies and disconcerted the gentlemen, but no one was indifferentto her skill.
That, along with so many other ephemeral images in the course of so many years, wouldsuddenly appear to Florentino Ariza at the whim of fate, and disappear again in the same way,leaving behind a throb of longing in his heart. Taken together, they marked the passage of his life,for he experienced the cruelty of time not so much in his own flesh as in the imperceptiblechanges he discerned in Fermina Daza each time he saw her.
One night he went to Don Sancho's Inn, an elegant colonial restaurant, and sat in the mostremote corner, as was his custom when he ate his frugal meals alone. All at once, in the largemirror on the back wall, he caught a glimpse of Fermina Daza sitting at a table with her husbandand two other couples, at an angle that allowed him to see her reflected in all her splendour. Shewas unguarded, she engaged in conversation with grace and laughter that exploded like fireworks,and her beauty was more radiant under the enormous teardrop chandeliers: once again, Alice hadgone through the looking glass.
Holding his breath, Florentino Ariza observed her at his pleasure: he saw her eat, he saw herhardly touch her wine, he saw her joke with the fourth in the line of Don Sanchos; from hissolitary table he shared a moment of her life, and for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, in theforbidden precincts of her intimacy. Then he drank four more cups of coffee to pass the time untilhe saw her leave with the rest of the group. They passed so close to him that he could distinguishher scent among the clouds of other perfumes worn by her companions.
From that night on, and for almost a year afterward, he laid unrelenting siege to the owner ofthe inn, offering him whatever he wanted, money or favours or whatever he desired most in life, ifhe would sell him the mirror. It was not easy, because old Don Sancho believed the legend that thebeautiful frame, carved by Viennese cabinetmakers, was the twin of another, which had belongedto Marie Antoinette and had disappeared without a trace: a pair of unique jewels. When at last hesurrendered, Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in his house, not for the exquisite frame but becauseof the place inside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved reflection.
When he saw Fermina Daza she was almost always on her husband's arm, the two of them inperfect harmony, moving through their own space with the astonishing fluidity of Siamese cats,which was broken only when they stopped to greet him. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in fact, shook hishand with warm cordiality, and on occasion even permitted himself a pat on the shoulder. She, onthe other hand, kept him relegated to an impersonal regime of formalities and never made theslightest gesture that might allow him to suspect that she remembered him from her unmarrieddays. They lived in two different worlds, but while he made every effort to reduce the distancebetween them, every step she took was in the opposite direction. It was a long time before hedared to think that her indifference was no more than a shield for her timidity. This occurred tohim suddenly, at the christening of the first freshwater vessel built in the local shipyards, whichwas also the first official occasion at which Florentino Ariza, as First Vice President of the R. C.
C., represented Uncle Leo XII. This coincidence imbued the ceremony with special solemnity, andeveryone of any significance in the life of the city was present.
Florentino Ariza was looking after his guests in the main salon of the ship, still redolent offresh paint and tar, when there was a burst of applause on the docks, and the band struck up atriumphal march. He had to repress the trembling that was almost as old as he was when he sawthe beautiful woman of his dreams on her husband's arm, splendid in her maturity, striding like aqueen from another time past the honour guard in parade uniform, under the shower of paperstreamers and flower petals tossed at them from the windows. Both responded to the ovation witha wave of the hand, but she was so dazzling, dressed in imperial gold from her high-heeledslippers and the foxtails at her throat to her bell-shaped hat, that she seemed to be alone in themidst of the crowd.
Florentino Ariza waited for them on the bridge with the provincial officials, surrounded bythe crash of the music and the fireworks and the three heavy screams from the ship, whichenveloped the dock in steam. Juvenal Urbino greeted the members of the reception line with thatnaturalness so typical of him, which made everyone think the Doctor bore him a special fondness:
first the ship's captain in his dress uniform, then the Archbishop, then the Governor with his andthe Mayor with his, and then the military commander, who was a newcomer from the Andes.
Beyond the officials stood Florentino Ariza, dressed in dark clothing and almost invisible amongso many eminent people. After greeting the military commander, Fermina seemed to hesitatebefore Florentino Ariza's outstretched hand. The military man, prepared to introduce them, askedher if they did not know each other. She did not say yes and she did not say no, but she held outher hand to Florentino Ariza with a salon smile. The same thing had occurred twice in the past,and would occur again, and Florentino Ariza always accepted these occasions with a strength ofcharacter worthy of Fermina Daza. But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacityfor illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.
The mere idea excited his youthful desires. Once again he haunted Fermina Daza's villa,filled with the same longings he had felt when he was on duty in the little Park of the Evangels,but his calculated intention was not that she see him, but rather that he see her and know that shewas still in the world. Now, however, it was difficult for him to escape notice. The District of LaManga was on a semi-deserted island, separated from the historic city by a canal of green waterand covered by thickets of icaco plum, which had sheltered Sunday lovers in colonial times. Inrecent years, the old stone bridge built by the Spaniards had been torn down, and in its stead wasone made of brick and lined with streetlamps for the new mule-drawn trolleys. At first theresidents of La Manga had to endure a torture that had not been anticipated during construction,which was sleeping so close to the city's first electrical plant whose vibration was a constantearthquake. Not even Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with all his prestige, could persuade them to move itwhere it would not disturb anyone, until his proven complicity with Divine Providence intercededon his behalf. One night the boiler in the plant blew up in a fearful explosion, flew over the newhouses, sailed across half the city, and destroyed the largest gallery in the former convent of St.
Julian the Hospitaler. The old ruined building had been abandoned at the beginning of the year, butthe boiler caused the deaths of four prisoners who had escaped from the local jail earlier that nightand were hiding in the chapel.
The peaceful suburb with its beautiful tradition of love was, however, not the most propitiousfor unrequited love when it became a luxury neighbourhood. The streets were dusty in summer,swamp-like in winter, and desolate all year round, and the scattered houses were hidden behindleafy gardens and had mosaic tile terraces instead of old-fashioned projecting balconies, as if theyhad been built for the purpose of discouraging furtive lovers. It was just as well that at this time itbecame fashionable to drive out in the afternoon in hired old Victorias that had been converted toone-horse carriages, and that the excursion ended on a hill where one could appreciate theheartbreaking twilights of October better than from the lighthouse, and observe the watchfulsharks lurking at the seminarians' beach, and see the Thursday ocean liner, huge and white, thatcould almost be touched with one's hands as it passed through the harbour channel. FlorentinoAriza would hire a Victoria after a hard day at the office, but instead of folding down the top, aswas customary during the hot months, he would stay hidden in the depths of the seat, invisible inthe darkness, always alone, and requesting unexpected routes so as not to arouse the evil thoughtsof the driver. In reality, the only thing that interested him on the drive was the pink marbleParthenon half hidden among leafy banana and mango trees, a luckless replica of the idyllicmansions on Louisiana cotton plantations. Fermina Daza's children returned home a little beforefive. Florentino Ariza would see them arrive in the family carriage, and then he would see Dr.
Juvenal Urbino leave for his routine house calls, but in almost a year of vigilance he never evencaught the glimpse he so desired.
One afternoon when he insisted on his solitary drive despite the first devastating rains ofJune, the horse slipped and fell in the mud. Florentino Ariza realised with horror that they werejust in front of Fermina Daza's villa, and he pleaded with the driver, not thinking that hisconsternation might betray him.
"Not here, please," he shouted. "Anywhere but here."Bewildered by his urgency, the driver tried to raise the horse without unharnessing him, andthe axle of the carriage broke. Florentino Ariza managed to climb out of the coach in the drivingrain and endure his embarrassment until passersby in other carriages offered to take him home.
While he was waiting, a servant of the Urbino family "ad seen him, his clothes soaked through,standing in mud up to his Knees, and she brought him an umbrella so that he could take refuge onthe terrace. In the wildest of his deliriums Florentino Ariza had never dreamed of such goodfortune, but on that afternoon he would have died rather than allow Fermina Daza to see him inthat condition.
For the rest of the year, Fermina Daza did not attend any civic or social ceremonies, not eventhe Christmas celebrations, in which she and her husband had always been illustrious protagonists.
But her absence was most notable on the opening night of the opera season. During intermission,Florentino Ariza happened on a group that, beyond any doubt, was discussing her withoutmentioning her name. They said that one midnight the previous June someone had seen herboarding the Cunard ocean liner en route to Panama, and that she wore a dark veil to hide theravages of the shameful disease that was consuming her. Someone asked what terrible illnesswould dare to attack a woman with so much power, and the answer he received was saturated withblack bile: "A lady so distinguished could suffer only from consumption."Florentino Ariza knew that the wealthy of his country did not contract short-term diseases.
Either they died without warning, almost always on the eve of a major holiday that could not becelebrated because of the period of mourning, or they faded away in long, abominable illnesseswhose most intimate details eventually became public knowledge. Seclusion in Panama wasalmost an obligatory penance in the life of the rich.
If he had been forced to choose, Florentino Ariza did not know which fate he would havewanted for Fermina Daza. More than anything else he wanted the truth, but no matter howunbearable, and regardless of how he searched, he could not find it. It was inconceivable to himthat no one could even give him a hint that would confirm the story he had heard. In the world ofriverboats, which was his world, no mystery could be maintained, no secret could be kept. And yetno one had heard anything about the woman in the black veil. No one knew anything in a citywhere everything was known, and where many things were known even before they happened,above all if they concerned the rich. But no one had any explanation for the disappearance ofFermina Daza. Florentino Ariza continued to patrol La Manga, continued to hear Mass withoutdevotion in the basilica of the seminary, continued to attend civic ceremonies that never wouldhave interested him in another state of mind, but the passage of time only increased the credibilityof the story he had heard. Everything seemed normal in the Urbino household, except for themother's absence.
As he carried on his investigation, he learned about other events he had not known of or intowhich he had made no enquiries, including the death of Lorenzo Daza in the Cantabrian villagewhere he had been born. He remembered seeing him for many years in the rowdy chess wars atthe Parish Caf? hoarse with so much talking, and growing fatter and rougher as he sank into thequicksand of an unfortunate old age. They had never exchanged another word since theirdisagreeable breakfast of anise in the previous century, and Florentino Ariza was certain that evenafter he had obtained for his daughter the successful marriage that had become his only reason forliving, Lorenzo Daza remembered him with as much rancour as he felt toward Lorenzo Daza. Buthe was so determined to find out the unequivocal facts regarding Fermina Daza's health that hereturned to the Parish Caf?to learn them from her father, just at the time of the historic tournamentin which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour alone confronted forty-two opponents. This was how hediscovered that Lorenzo Daza had died, and he rejoiced with all his heart, although the price of hisjoy might be having to live without the truth. At last he accepted as true the story of the hospitalfor the terminally ill, and his only consolation was the old saying: Sick women live forever. On thedays when he felt disheartened, he resigned himself to the notion that the news of Fermina Daza'sdeath, if it should occur, would find him without his having to look for it.
She had left with no scandal, by mutual agreement with her husband, both of them as entangled asadolescents in the only serious crisis they had suffered during so many years of stable matrimony.
It had taken them by surprise in the repose of their maturity, when they felt themselves safe frommisfortune's sneak attacks, their children grown and well-behaved, and the future ready for themto learn how to be old without bitterness. It had been something so unexpected for them both thatthey wanted to resolve it not with shouts, tears, and intermediaries, as was the custom in theCaribbean, but with the wisdom of the nations of Europe, and there was so much vacillation as towhether their loyalties lay here or over there that they ended up mired in a puerile situation thatdid not belong anywhere. At last she decided to leave, not even knowing why or to what purpose,out of sheer fury, and he, inhibited by his sense of guilt, had not been able to dissuade her.
That at least was the conclusion drawn by Juvenal Urbino from his son's letters. Moreover, at thattime the Bishop of Riohacha went there on a pastoral visit, riding under the pallium on hiscelebrated white mule with the trappings embroidered in gold. Behind him came pilgrims fromremote regions, musicians playing accordions, peddlers selling food and amulets; and for threedays the ranch was overflowing with the crippled and the hopeless, who in reality did not come forthe learned sermons and the plenary indulgences but for the favours of the mule who, it was said,performed miracles behind his master's back. The Bishop had frequented the home of the Urbinode la Calle family ever since his days as an ordinary priest, and one afternoon he escaped from thepublic festivities to have lunch at Hildebranda's ranch. After the meal, during which they spokeonly of earthly matters, he took Fermina Daza aside and asked to hear her confession. She refusedin an amiable but firm manner, with the explicit argument that she had nothing to repent of.
Although it was not her purpose, at least not her conscious purpose, she was certain that heranswer would reach the appropriate ears.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say, not without a certain cynicism, that it was not he who was toblame for those two bitter years of his life but his wife's bad habit of smelling the clothes herfamily took off, and the clothes that she herself took off, so that she could tell by the odour if theyneeded to be laundered even though they might appear to be clean. She had done this ever sinceshe was a girl, and she never thought it worthy of comment until her husband realised what shewas doing on their wedding night. He also knew that she locked herself in the bathroom at leastthree times a day to smoke, but this did not attract his attention because the women of his classwere in the habit of locking themselves away in groups to talk about men and smoke, and even todrink as much as two litres of aguardiente until they had passed out on the floor in a brickmason'sdrunken stupor. But her habit of sniffing at all the clothing she happened across seemed to him notonly inappropriate but unhealthy as well. She took it as a joke, which is what she did witheverything she did not care to discuss, and she said that God had not put that diligent oriole's beakon her face just for decoration. One morning, while she was at the market, the servants aroused theentire neighbourhood in their search for her three-year-old son, who was not to be found anywherein the house. She arrived in the middle of the panic, turned around two or three times like atracking mastiff, and found the boy asleep in an armoire where no one thought he could possiblybe hiding. When her astonished husband asked her how she had found him, she replied: "By thesmell of caca."The truth is that her sense of smell not only served her in regard to washing clothes or findinglost children: it was the sense that oriented her in all areas of life, above all in her social life.
Juvenal Urbino had observed this throughout his marriage, in particular at the beginning, when shewas the parvenu in a milieu that had been prejudiced against her for three hundred years, and yetshe had made her way through coral reefs as sharp as knives, not colliding with anyone, with apower over the world that could only be a supernatural instinct. That frightening faculty, whichcould just as well have had its origin in a millenarian wisdom as in a heart of stone, met itsmoment of misfortune one ill-fated Sunday before Mass when, out of simple habit, Fermina Dazasniffed the clothing her husband had worn the evening before and experienced the disturbingsensation that she had been in bed with another man.
First she smelled the jacket and the vest while she took the watch chain out of the buttonholeand removed the pencil holder and the billfold and the loose change from the pockets and placedeverything on the dresser, and then she smelled the hemmed shirt as she removed the tiepin andthe topaz cuff links and the gold collar button, and then she smelled the trousers as she removedthe keyholder with its eleven keys and the penknife with its mother-of-pearl handle, and finallyshe smelled the underwear and the socks and the linen handkerchief with the embroideredmonogram. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there was an odour in each of the articles that had notbeen there in all their years of life together, an odour impossible to define because it was not thescent of flowers or of artificial essences but of something peculiar to human nature. She saidnothing, and she did not notice the odour every day, but she now sniffed at her husband's clothingnot to decide if it was ready to launder but with an unbearable anxiety that gnawed at herinnermost being.
Fermina Daza did not know where to locate the odour of his clothing in her husband'sroutine. It could not be placed between his morning class and lunch, for she supposed that nowoman in her right mind would make hurried love at that time of day, least of all with a visitor,when the house still had to be cleaned, and the beds made, and the marketing done, and lunchprepared, and perhaps with the added worry that one of the children would be sent home earlyfrom school because somebody threw a stone at him and hurt his head and he would find her ateleven o'clock in the morning, naked in the unmade bed and, to make matters worse, with a doctoron top of her. She also knew that Dr. Juvenal Urbino made love only at night, better yet in absolutedarkness, and as a last resort before breakfast when the first birds began to chirp. After that time,as he would say, it was more work than the pleasure of daytime love was worth to take off one'sclothes and put them back on again. So that the contamination of his clothing could occur onlyduring one of his house calls or during some moment stolen from his nights of chess and films.
This last possibility was difficult to prove, because unlike so many of her friends, Fermina Dazawas too proud to spy on her husband or to ask someone else to do it for her. His schedule of housecalls, which seemed best suited to infidelity, was also the easiest to keep an eye on, because Dr.
Juvenal Urbino kept a detailed record of each of his patients, including the payment of his fees,from the first time he visited them until he ushered them out of this world with a final sign of thecross and some words for the salvation of their souls.
In the three weeks that followed, Fermina Daza did not find the odour in his clothing for afew days, she found it again when she least expected it, and then she found it, stronger than ever,for several days in a row, although one of those days was a Sunday when there had been a familygathering and the two of them had not been apart for even a moment. Contrary to her normalcustom and even her own desires, she found herself in her husband's office one afternoon as if shewere someone else, doing something that she would never do, deciphering with an exquisiteBengalese magnifying glass his intricate notes on the house calls he had made during the last fewmonths. It was the first time she had gone alone into that office, saturated with showers ofcreosote and crammed with books bound in the hides of unknown animals, blurred schoolpictures, honorary degrees, astrolabes, and elaborately worked daggers collected over the years: asecret sanctuary that she always considered the only part of her husband's private life to which shehad no access because it was not part of love, so that the few times she had been there she hadgone with him, and the visits had always been very brief. She did not feel she had the right to goin alone, much less to engage in what seemed to be indecent prying. But there she was. Shewanted to find the truth, and she searched for it with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fearof finding it, and she was driven by an irresistible wind even stronger than her innate haughtiness,even stronger than her dignity: an agony that bewitched her.
She was able to draw no conclusions, because her husband's patients, except for mutualfriends, were part of his private domain; they were people without identity, known not by theirfaces but by their pains, not by the colour of their eyes or the evasions of their hearts but by thesize of their livers, the coating on their tongues, the blood in their urine, the hallucinations of theirfeverish nights. They were people who believed in her husband, who believed they lived becauseof him when in reality they lived for him, and who in the end were reduced to a phrase written inhis own hand at the bottom of the medical file: Be calm. God awaits you at the door. FerminaDaza left his study after two fruitless hours, with the feeling that she had allowed herself to beseduced by indecency.
Urged on by her imagination, she began to discover changes in her husband. She found himevasive, without appetite at the table or in bed, prone to exasperation and ironic answers, andwhen he was at home he was no longer the tranquil man he had once been but a caged lion. Forthe first time since their marriage, she began to monitor the times he was late, to keep track ofthem to the minute, to tell him lies in order to learn the truth, but then she felt wounded to thequick by the contradictions. One night she awoke with a start, terrified by a vision of her husbandstaring at her in the darkness with eyes that seemed full of hatred. She had suffered a similar frightin her youth, when she had seen Florentino Ariza at the foot of her bed, but that apparition hadbeen full of love, not hate. Besides, this time it was not fantasy: her husband was awake at two inthe morning, sitting up in bed to watch her while she slept, but when she asked him why, hedenied it. He lay back on the pillow and said: "You must have been dreaming."After that night, and after similar episodes that occurred during that time, when FerminaDaza could not tell for certain where reality ended and where illusion began, she had theoverwhelming revelation that she was losing her mind. At last she realised that her husband hadnot taken Communion on the Thursday of Corpus Christi or on any Sunday in recent weeks, andhe had not found time for that year's retreats. When she asked him the reason for those unusualchanges in his spiritual health, she received an evasive answer. This was the decisive clue, becausehe had not failed to take Communion on an important feast day since he had made his firstCommunion, at the age of eight. In this way she realised not only that her husband was in a stateof mortal sin but that he had resolved to persist in it, since he did not go to his confessor for help.
She had never imagined that she could suffer so much for something that seemed to be theabsolute opposite of love, but she was suffering, and she resolved that the only way she couldkeep from dying was to burn out the nest of vipers that was poisoning her soul. And that is whatshe did. One afternoon she began to darn socks on the terrace while her husband was reading, ashe did every day after his siesta. Suddenly she interrupted her work, pushed her eyeglasses up ontoher forehead, and without any trace of harshness, she asked for an explanation: "Doctor."He was immersed in L'Ile des pingouins, the novel that everyone was reading in those days,and he answered without surfacing: "Oui." She insisted: "Look at me."He did so, looking without seeing her through the fog of his reading glasses, but he did nothave to take them off to feel burned by the raging fire in her eyes.
"What is going on?" he asked.
"You know better than I," she said.
That was all she said. She lowered her glasses and continued darning socks. Dr. JuvenalUrbino knew then that the long hours of anguish were over. The moment had not been as he hadforeseen it; rather than a seismic tremor in his heart, it was a calming blow, and a great relief thatwhat was bound to happen sooner or later had happened sooner rather than later: the ghost of MissBarbara Lynch had entered his house at last.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino had met her four months earlier as she waited her turn in the clinic ofMisericordia Hospital, and he knew immediately that something irreparable had just occurred inhis destiny. She was a tall, elegant, large-boned mulatta, with skin the colour and softness ofmolasses, and that morning she wore a red dress with white polka dots and a broad-brimmed hatof the same fabric, which shaded her face down to her eyelids. Her sex seemed more pronouncedthan that of other human beings. Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not attend patients in the clinic, butwhenever he passed by and had time to spare, he would go in to remind his more advancedstudents that there is no medicine better than a good diagnosis. So that he arranged to be present atthe examination of the unforeseen mulatta, making certain that his pupils would not notice anygesture of his that did not appear to be casual and barely looking at her, but fixing her name andaddress with care in his memory. That afternoon, after his last house call, he had his carriage passby the address that she had given in the consulting room, and in fact there she was, enjoying thecoolness on her terrace.
It was a typical Antillean house, painted yellow even to the tin roof, with burlap windows andpots of carnations and ferns hanging in the doorway. It rested on wooden pilings in the saltmarshes of Mala Crianza. A troupial sang in the cage that hung from the eaves. Across the streetwas a primary school, and the children rushing out obliged the coachman to keep a tight hold onthe reins so that the horse would not shy. It was a stroke of luck, for Miss Barbara Lynch had timeto recognise the Doctor. She waved to him as if they were old friends, she invited him to havecoffee while the confusion abated, and he was delighted to accept (although it was not his customto drink coffee) and to listen to her talk about herself, which was the only thing that had interestedhim since the morning and the only thing that was going to interest him, without a moment'srespite, during the months to follow. Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with hiswife present, that sooner or later he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger thestability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself, knew the strength of his moral roots,had laughed at the prediction. And now it had come true.
Miss Barbara Lynch, Doctor of Theology, was the only child of the Reverend Jonathan B.
Lynch, a lean black Protestant minister who rode on a mule through the poverty-strickensettlements in the salt marshes, preaching the word of one of the many gods that Dr. JuvenalUrbino wrote with a small g to distinguish them from his. She spoke good Spanish, with a certainroughness in the syntax, and her frequent slips heightened her charm. She would be twenty-eightyears old in December, not long ago she had divorced another minister, who was a student of herfather's and to whom she had been unhappily married for two years, and she had no desire torepeat the offence. She said: "I have no more love than my troupial." But Dr. Urbino was tooserious to think that she said it with hidden intentions. On the contrary: he asked himself inbewilderment if so many opportunities coming together might not be one of God's pitfalls, whichhe would then have to pay for dearly, but he dismissed the thought without delay as a piece oftheological nonsense resulting from his state of confusion.
As he was about to leave, he made a casual remark about that morning's medicalconsultation, knowing that nothing pleases patients more than talking about their ailments, and shewas so splendid talking about hers that he promised he would return the next day, at four o'clocksharp, to examine her with greater care. She was dismayed: she knew that a doctor of hisqualifications was far above her ability to pay, but he reassured her: "In this profession we try tohave the rich pay for the poor. " Then he marked in his notebook: Miss Barbara Lynch, MalaCrianza Salt Marsh, Saturday, 4 p. m. Months later, Fermina Daza was to read that notation,augmented by details of the diagnosis, treatment, and evolution of the disease. The name attractedher attention, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was one of those dissolute artists from theNew Orleans fruit boats, but the address made her think that she must come from Jamaica, a blackwoman, of course, and she eliminated her without a second thought as not being to her husband'staste.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino came ten minutes early for the Saturday appointment, and Miss Lynchhad not finished dressing to receive him. He had not felt so much tension since his days in Pariswhen he had to present himself for an oral examination. As she lay on her canvas bed, wearing athin silk slip, Miss Lynch's beauty was endless. Everything about her was large and intense: hersiren's thighs, her slow-burning skin, her astonished breasts, her diaphanous gums with theirperfect teeth, her whole body radiating a vapour of good health that was the human odour FerminaDaza had discovered in her husband's clothing. She had gone to the clinic because she sufferedfrom something that she, with much charm, called "twisted colons," and Dr. Urbino thought that itwas a symptom that should not be ignored. So he palpated her internal organs with more intentionthan attention, and as he did so he discovered in amazement that this marvellous creature was asbeautiful inside as out, and then he gave himself over to the delights of touch, no longer the best-qualified physician along the Caribbean coastline but a poor soul tormented by his tumultuousinstincts. Only once before in his austere professional life had something similar happened to him,and that had been the day of his greatest shame, because the indignant patient had moved his handaway, sat up in bed, and said to him: "What you want may happen, but it will not be like this."Miss Lynch, on the other hand, abandoned herself to his hands, and when she was certain that theDoctor was no longer thinking about his science, she said: "I thought this not permitted by yourethics."He was as drenched by perspiration as if he had just stepped out of a pool wearing all hisclothes, and he dried his hands and face with a towel.
"Our code of ethics supposes," he said, "that we doctors are made of wood.""The fact I thought so does not mean you cannot do," she said. "Just think what it mean forpoor black woman like me to have such a famous man notice her.""I have not stopped thinking about you for an instant," he said.
It was so tremulous a confession that it might have inspired pity. But she saved him from allharm with a laugh that lit up the bedroom.
"I know since I saw you in hospital, Doctor," she said. "Black I am but not a fool."It was far from easy. Miss Lynch wanted her honour protected, she wanted security and love,in that order, and she believed that she deserved them. She gave Dr. Urbino the opportunity toseduce her but not to penetrate her inner sanctum, even when she was alone in the house. Shewould go no further than allowing him to repeat the ceremony of palpation and auscultation withall the ethical violations he could desire, but without taking off her clothes. For his part, he couldnot let go of the bait once he had bitten, and he continued his almost daily incursions. For reasonsof a practical nature, it was close to impossible for him to maintain a continuing relationship withMiss Lynch, but he was too weak to stop, as he would later be too weak to go any further. Thiswas his limit.
The Reverend Lynch did not lead a regular life, for he would ride away on his mule on thespur of the moment, carrying Bibles and evangelical pamphlets on one side and provisions on theother, and he would return when least expected. Another difficulty was the school across the street,for the children would recite their lessons as they looked out the windows, and what they saw withgreatest clarity was the house across the way, with its doors and windows open wide from sixo'clock in the morning, they saw Miss Lynch hanging the birdcage from the eaves so that thetroupial could learn the recited lessons, they saw her wearing a bright-coloured turban and goingabout her household tasks as she recited along with them in her brilliant Caribbean voice, and laterthey saw her sitting on the porch, reciting the afternoon psalms by herself in English.
They had to choose a time when the children were not there, and there were only twopossibilities: the afternoon recess for lunch, between twelve and two, which was also when theDoctor had his lunch, or late in the afternoon, after the children had gone home. This was alwaysthe best time, although by then the Doctor had made his rounds and had only a few minutes tospare before it was time for him to eat with his family. The third problem, and the most serious forhim, was his own situation. It was not possible for him to go there without his carriage, which wasvery well known and always had to wait outside her door. He could have made an accomplice ofhis coachman, as did most of his friends at the Social Club, but that was not in his nature. In fact,when his visits to Miss Lynch became too obvious, the liveried family coachman himself dared toask if it would not be better for him to come back later so that the carriage would not spend somuch time at her door. Dr. Urbino, in a sharp response that was not typical of him, cut him off.
"This is the first time since I know you that I have heard you say something you should nothave," he said. "Well, then: I will assume it was never said."There was no solution. In a city like this, it was impossible to hide an illness when theDoctor's carriage stood at the door. At times the Doctor himself took the initiative and went onfoot, if distance permitted, or in a hired carriage, to avoid malicious or premature assumptions.
Such deceptions, however, were to little avail. Since the prescriptions ordered in pharmaciesrevealed the truth, Dr. Urbino would always prescribe counterfeit medicines along with the correctones in order to preserve the sacred right of the sick to die in peace along with the secret of theirillness. Similarly, he was able in various truthful ways to account for the presence of his carriageoutside the house of Miss Lynch, but he could not allow it to stay there too long, least of all for theamount of time he would have desired, which was the rest of his life.
The world became a hell for him. For once the initial madness was sated, they both becameaware of the risks involved, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino never had the resolve to face a scandal. In thedeliriums of passion he promised everything, but when it was over, everything was left for later.
On the other hand, as his desire to be with her grew, so did his fear of losing her, so that theirmeetings became more and more hurried and problematic. He thought about nothing else. Hewaited for the afternoons with unbearable longing, he forgot his other commitments, he forgoteverything but her, but as his carriage approached the Mala Crianza salt marsh he prayed to Godthat an unforeseen obstacle would force it to drive past. He went to her in a state of such anguishthat at times as he turned the corner he was glad to catch a glimpse of the woolly head of theReverend Lynch, who read on the terrace while his daughter catechized neighbourhood children inthe living room with recited passages of scripture. Then he would go home relieved that he wasnot defying fate again, but later he would feel himself going mad with the desire for it to be fiveo'clock in the afternoon all day, every day.
So their love became impossible when the carriage at her door became too conspicuous, andafter three months it became nothing less than ridiculous. Without time to say anything, MissLynch would go to the bedroom as soon as she saw her agitated lover walk in the door. She tookthe precaution of wearing a full skirt on the days she expected him, a charming skirt from Jamaicawith red flowered ruffles, but with no underwear, nothing, in the belief that this convenience wasgoing to help him ward off his fear. But he squandered everything she did to make him happy.
Panting and drenched with perspiration, he rushed after her into the bedroom, throwing everythingon the floor, his walking stick, his medical bag, his Panama hat, and he made panic-stricken lovewith his trousers down around his knees, with his jacket buttoned so that it would not get in hisway, with his gold watch chain across his vest, with his shoes on, with everything on, and moreconcerned with leaving as soon as possible than with achieving pleasure. She was left dangling,barely at the entrance of her tunnel of solitude, while he was already buttoning up again, asexhausted as if he had made absolute love on the dividing line between life and death, when inreality he had accomplished no more than the physical act that is only a part of the feat of love.
But he had finished in time: the exact time needed to give an injection during a routine visit. Thenhe returned home ashamed of his weakness, longing for death, cursing himself for the lack ofcourage that kept him from asking Fermina Daza to pull down his trousers and burn his ass on thebrazier.
He did not eat, he said his prayers without conviction, in bed he pretended to continue hissiesta reading while his wife walked round and round the house putting the world in order beforegoing to bed. As he nodded over his book, he began to sink down into the inevitable mangroveswamp of Miss Lynch, into her air of a recumbent forest glade, his deathbed, and then he couldthink of nothing except tomorrow's five minutes to five o'clock in the afternoon and her waitingfor him in bed with nothing but the mound of her dark bush under her madwoman's skirt fromJamaica: the hellish circle.
In the past few years he had become conscious of the burden of his own body. He recognisedthe symptoms. He had read about them in textbooks, he had seen them confirmed in real life, inolder patients with no history of serious ailments who suddenly began to describe perfectsyndromes that seemed to come straight from medical texts and yet turned out to be imaginary.
All the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearance in his body.
He felt the shape of his liver with such clarity that he could tell its size without touching it. He feltthe dozing cat's purr of his kidneys, he felt the iridescent brilliance of his vesicles, he felt thehumming blood in his arteries. At times he awoke at dawn gasping for air, like a fish out of water.
He had fluid in his heart. He felt it lose the beat for a moment, he felt it syncopate like a schoolmarching band, once, twice, and then, because God is good, he felt it recover at last. But instead ofhaving recourse to the same distracting remedies he gave to his patients, he went mad with terror.
It was true: all he needed in life, even at the age of fifty-eight, was someone who understood him.
So he turned to Fermina Daza, the person who loved him best and whom he loved best in theworld, and with whom he had just eased his conscience.
For this occurred after she interrupted his afternoon reading to ask him to look at her, and hehad the first indication that his hellish circle had been discovered. But he did not know how,because it would have been impossible for him to conceive of Fermina Daza's learning the truthby smell alone. In any case, for a long time this had not been a good city for keeping secrets. Soonafter the first home telephones were installed, several marriages that seemed stable were destroyedby anonymous tale-bearing calls, and a number of frightened families either cancelled their serviceor refused to have a telephone for many years. Dr. Urbino knew that his wife had too much self-respect to allow so much as an attempt at anonymous betrayal by telephone, and he could notimagine anyone daring to try it under his own name. But he feared the old method: a note slippedunder the door by an unknown hand could be effective, not only because it guaranteed the doubleanonymity of sender and receiver, but because its time-honoured ancestry permitted one toattribute to it some kind of metaphysical connection to the designs of Divine Providence.
Jealousy was unknown in his house: during more than thirty years of conjugal peace, Dr.
Urbino had often boasted in public--and until now it had been true--that he was like those Swedishmatches that light only with their own box. But he did not know how a woman with as muchpride, dignity, and strength of character as his wife would react in the face of proven infidelity. Sothat after looking at her as she had asked, nothing occurred to him but to lower his eyes again inorder to hide his embarrassment and continue the pretence of being lost among the sweet,meandering rivers of Alca Island until he could think of something else. Fermina Daza, for herpart, said nothing more either. When she finished darning the socks, she tossed everything into thesewing basket in no particular order, gave instructions in the kitchen for supper, and went to thebedroom.
Then he reached the admirable decision not to go to Miss Lynch's house at five o'clock in theafternoon. The vows of eternal love, the dream of a discreet house for her alone where he couldvisit her with no unexpected interruptions, their unhurried happiness for as long as they lived-everythinghe had promised in the blazing heat of love was cancelled forever after. The last thingMiss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box wrapped in paper from thepharmacy, so that the coachman himself thought it was an emergency prescription and handed it toher with no comment, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not evenby accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bittertears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. Atfive o'clock, instead of going to see her, he made a profound act of contrition before his confessor,and on the following Sunday he took Communion, his heart broken but his soul at peace.
That night, following his renunciation, as he was undressing for bed, he recited for FerminaDaza the bitter litany of his early morning insomnia, his sudden stabbing pains, his desire to weepin the afternoon, the encoded symptoms of secret love, which he recounted as if they were themiseries of old age. He had to tell someone or die, or else tell the truth, and so the relief heobtained was sanctified within the domestic rituals of love. She listened to him with closeattention, but without looking at him, without saying anything as she picked up every article ofclothing he removed, sniffed it with no gesture or change of expression that might betray herwrath, then crumpled it and tossed it into the wicker basket for dirty clothes. She did not find theodour, but it was all the same: tomorrow was another day. Before he knelt down to pray before thealtar in the bedroom, he ended the recital of his misery with a sigh as mournful as it was sincere:
"I think I am going to die." She did not even blink when she replied.
"That would be best," she said. "Then we could both have some peace."Years before, during the crisis of a dangerous illness, he had spoken of the possibility ofdying, and she had made the same brutal reply. Dr. Urbino attributed it to the naturalhardheartedness of women, which allows the earth to continue revolving around the sun, becauseat that time he did not know that she always erected a barrier of wrath to hide her fear. And in thiscase it was the most terrible one of all, the fear of losing him.
That night, on the other hand, she wished him dead with all her heart, and this certaintyalarmed him. Then he heard her slow sobbing in the darkness as she bit the pillow so he would nothear. He was puzzled, because he knew that she did not cry easily for any affliction of body orsoul. She cried only in rage, above all if it had its origins in her terror of culpability, and then themore she cried the more enraged she became, because she could never forgive her weakness incrying. He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger runthrough by a spear, and he did not have the courage to tell her that the reason for her weeping haddisappeared that afternoon, had been pulled out by the roots, forever, even from his memory.
Fatigue overcame him for a few minutes. When he awoke, she had lit her dim bedside lampand lay there with her eyes open, but without crying. Something definitive had happened to herwhile he slept: the sediment that had accumulated at the bottom of her life over the course of somany years had been stirred up by the torment of her jealousy and had floated to the surface, and ithad aged her all at once. Shocked by her sudden wrinkles, her faded lips, the ashes in her hair, herisked telling her that she should try to sleep: it was after two o'clock. She spoke, not looking athim but with no trace of rage in her voice, almost with gentleness.
"I have a right to know who she is," she said.
And then he told her everything, feeling as if he were lifting the weight of the world from hisshoulders, because he was convinced that she already knew and only needed to confirm thedetails. But she did not, of course, so that as he spoke she began to cry again, not with her earliertimid sobs but with abundant salty tears that ran down her cheeks and burned her nightdress andinflamed her life, because he had not done what she, with her heart in her mouth, had hoped hewould do, which was to be a man: deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and growindignant at the false accusation, and shout curses at this ill-begotten society that did not hesitateto trample on one's honour, and remain imperturbable even when faced with crushing proofs of hisdisloyalty. Then, when he told her that he had been with his confessor that afternoon, she fearedshe would go blind with rage. Ever since her days at the Academy she had been convinced that themen and women of the Church lacked any virtue inspired by God. This was a discordant note inthe harmony of the house, which they had managed to overlook without mishap. But her husband'sallowing his confessor to be privy to an intimacy that was not only his but hers as well was morethan she could bear.
"You might as well have told a snake charmer in the market," she said.
For her it was the end of everything. She was sure that her honour was the subject of gossipeven before her husband had finished his penance, and the feeling of humiliation that thisproduced in her was much less tolerable than the shame and anger and injustice caused by hisinfidelity. And worst of all, damn it: with a black woman. He corrected her: "With a mulatta." Butby then it was too late for accuracy: she had finished.
Without knowing her reasons, the children understood it as a trip she had often put off and thatthey themselves had wanted her to make for a long time. Dr. Urbino arranged matters so that noone in his perfidious circle could engage in malicious speculation, and he did it so well that ifFlorentino Ariza could find no clue to Fermina Daza's disappearance it was because in fact therewas none, not because he lacked the means to investigate. Her husband had no doubts that shewould come home as soon as she got over her rage. But she left certain that her rage would neverend.
The Civil and Military Commander of the city, who had been advised of her arr