第5章 CHAPTER FIVE

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

“In 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 Fermina Daza. But it was not so dangerous after all. Or at least not so much dangerous as depressing. The balloon reached its destination without incident after a peaceful trip through an incredible blue sky. They flew well and very low, with a calm, favorable wind, first along the spurs of the snow-covered mountains and then over the vastness of the Great Swamp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From that night on, and for almost a year afterward, he laid un-relenting siege to the owner of the inn, offering him whatever he wanted, money or favors or whatever he desired most in life, if he would sell him the mirror. It was not easy, because old Don Sancho believed the legend that the beautiful frame, carved by Viennese cabinetmakers, was the twin of another, which had belonged to Marie Antoinette and had disappeared without a trace: a pair of unique jewels. When at last he surrendered, Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in his house, not for the exquisite frame but because of the place inside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved reflection. When he saw Fermina Daza she was almost always on her husband's arm, the two of them in perfect harmony, moving through their own space with the astonishing fluidity of Siamese cats, which was broken only when they stopped to greet him. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in fact, shook his hand with warm cordiality, and on occa-sion even permitted himself a pat on the shoulder. She, on the other hand, kept him relegated to an impersonal regime of formalities and never made the slightest gesture that might allow him to suspect that she remembered him from her unmarried days. They lived in two different worlds, but while he made every effort to reduce the distance between them, every step she took was in the opposite direction. It was a long time before he dared to think that her in-difference was no more than a shield for her timidity. This occurred to him suddenly, at the christening of the first freshwater vessel built in the local shipyards, which was also the first official occasion at which Flore ntino Ariza, as First Vice President of the RCC, repre-sented Uncle Leo XII. This coincidence imbued the ceremony with special solemnity, and everyone of any significance in the life of the city was present. Florentino Ariza was looking after his guests in the main salon of the ship, still redolent of fresh paint and tar, when there was a burst of applause on the docks, and the band struck up a triumphal march. He had to repress the trembling that was almost as old as he was when he saw the beautiful woman of his dreams on her husband's arm, splendid in her maturity, striding like a queen from another time past the honor guard in parade uniform, under the shower of paper streamers and flower petals tossed at them from the windows. Both responded to the ovation with a wave of the hand, but she was so dazzling, dressed in imperial gold from her high-heeled slippers and the foxtails at her throat to her bell-shaped hat, that she seemed to be alone in the midst of the crowd. Florentino Ariza waited for them on the bridge with the provin-cial officials, surrounded by the crash of the music and the fireworks and the three heavy screams from the ship, which enveloped the dock in steam. Juvenal Urbino greeted the members of the reception line with that naturalness so typical of him, which made everyone think the Doctor bore him a special fondness: first the ship's captain in his dress uniform, then the Archbishop, then the Governor with his and the Mayor with his, and then the military commander, who was a newcomer from the Andes. Beyond the officials stood Floren-tino Ariza, dressed in dark clothing and almost invisible among so many eminent people. After greeting the military commander, Fermina seemed to hesitate before Florentino Ariza's outstretched hand. The military man, prepared to introduce them, asked her if they did not know each other. She did not say yes and she did not say no, but she held out her hand to Florentino Ariza with a salon smile. The s ame thing had occurred twice in the past, and would occur again, and Florentino Ariza always accepted these occasions with a strength of character worthy of Fermina Daza. But that after-noon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love. The mere idea excited his youthful desires. Once again he haunted Fermina Daza's villa, filled with the same longings he had felt when he was on duty in the little Park of the Evangels, but his calculated intention was not that she see him, but rather that he see her and know that she was still in the world. Now, however, it was difficult for him to escape notice. The District of La Manga was on a semi-deserted island, separated from the historic city by a canal of green water and covered by thickets of icaco plum, which had sheltered Sunday lovers in colonial times. In recent years, the old stone bridge built by the Spaniards had been torn down, and in its stead was one made of brick and lined with streetlamps for the new mule-drawn trolleys. At first the residents of La Manga had to endure a torture that had not been anticipated during construction, which was sleeping so close to the city's first electrical plant whose vibration was a constant earthquake. Not even Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with all his prestige, could persuade them to move it where it would not disturb anyone, until his proven complicity with Divine Providence inter-ceded on his behalf. One night the boiler in the plant blew up in a fearful explosion, flew over the new houses, sailed across half the city, and destroyed the largest gallery in the former convent of St. Julian the Hospitaler. The old ruined building had been abandoned at the beginning of the year, but the boiler caused the deaths of four prisoners who had escaped from the local jail earlier that night and were hiding in the chapel. The peaceful suburb with its beautiful tradition of love was, however, not the most propitious for unrequited love when it became a luxury neighborhood. The streets were dusty in summer, swamp-like in winter, and desolate all year round, and the scattered houses were hidden behind leafy gardens and had mosaic tile terraces instead of old-fashioned projecting balconies, as if they had been built for the purpose of discouraging furtive lovers. It was just as well that at this time it became fashionable to drive out in the afternoon in hired old Victorias that had been converted to one-horse carriages, and that the excursion ended on a hill where one could appreciate the heart-breaking twilights of October better than from the lighthouse, and observe the watchful sharks lurking at the seminarians' beach, and see the Thursday ocean liner, huge and white, that could almost be touched with one's hands as it passed through the harbor channel. Florentino Ariza would hire a Victoria after a hard day at the office, but instead of folding down the top, as was customary during the hot months, he would stay hidden in the depths of the seat, invisible in the darkness, always alone, and requesting unexpected routes so as not to arouse the evil thoughts of the driver. In reality, the only thing that interested him on the drive was the pink marble Parthenon half hidden among leafy banana and mango trees, a luckless replica of the idyllic mansions on Louisiana cotton plantations. Fermina Daza's children returned home a little before five. Florentino Ariza would see them arrive in the family carriage, and then he would see Dr. Juvenal Urbino leave for his routine house calls, but in almost a year of vigilance he never even caught the glimpse he so desired. One afternoon when he insisted on his solitary drive despite the first devastating rains of June, the horse slipped and fell in the mud. Florentino Ariza realized with horror that they were just in front of Fermina Daza's villa, and he pleaded with the driver, not thinking that his consternation might betray him. “Not here, please,” he shouted. “Anywhere but here.” Bewildered by his urgency, the driver tried to raise the horse without unharnessing him, and the axle of the carriage broke. Floren-tino Ariza managed to climb out of the coach in the driving rain and endure his embarrassment until passersby in other carriages offered to take him home. While he was waiting, a servant of the Urbino family “ad seen him, his clothes soaked through, standing in mud up to his Knees, and she brought him an umbrella so that he could take refuge on the terrace. In the wildest of his deliriums Florentino Ariza had never dreamed of such good fortune, but on that afternoon he would have died rather than allow Fermina Daza to see him in that condition. When they lived in the old city, Juvenal Urbino and his family would walk on Sundays from their house to the Cathedral for eight o'clock Mass, which for them was more a secular ceremony than a religious one. Then, when they moved, they continued to drive there for several years, and at times they visited with friends under the palm trees in the park. But when the temple of the theological seminary was built in La Manga, with a private beach and its own cemetery, they no longer went to the Cathedral except on very solemn occasions. Ignorant of these changes, Florentino Ariza waited Sunday after Sunday on the terrace of the Parish Cafe, watching the people coming out of all three Masses. Then he realized his mistake and went to the new church, which was fashionable until just a few years ago, and there, at eight o'clock sharp on four Sundays in August, he saw Dr. Juvenal Urbino with his children, but Fermina Daza was not with them. On one of those Sundays he visited the new cemetery adjacent to the church, where the residents of La Manga were build-ing their sumptuous pantheons, and his heart skipped a beat when he discovered the most sumptuous of all in the shade of the great ceiba trees. It was already complete, with Gothic stained-glass windows and marble angels and gravestones with gold lettering for the entire family. Among them, of course, was that of Do?a Fermina Daza de Urbino de la Calle, and next to it her husband's, with a common epitaph: Together still in the peace of the Lord. For the rest of the year, Fermina Daza did not attend any civic or social ceremonies, not even the Christmas celebrations, in which she and her husband had always been illustrious protagonists. But her absence was most notable on the opening night of the opera season. During intermission, Florentino Ariza happened on a group that, be-yond any doubt, was discussing her without mentioning her name. They said that one midnight the previous June someone had seen her boarding the Cunard ocean liner en route to Panama, and that she wore a dark veil to hide the ravages of the shameful disease that was con-suming her. Someone asked what terrible illness would dare to attack a woman with so much power, and the answer he received was saturated with black bile: “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 be celebrated because of the period of mourning, or they faded away in long, abominable illnesses whose most intimate details eventually became public knowledge. Seclusion in Panama was almost an obligatory penance in the life of the rich. They submitted to God's will in the Adventist Hospital, an immense white warehouse lost in the pre-historic downpours of Darien, where the sick lost track of the little life that was left to them, and in whose solitary rooms with their burlap windows no one could tell with certainty if the smell of carbolic acid was the odor of health or of death. Those who recovered came back bearing splendid gifts that they would distribute with a free hand and a kind of agonized longing to be pardoned for their indiscretion in still being alive. Some returned with their abdomens crisscrossed by barbarous stitches that seemed to have been sewn with cobbler's hemp; they would raise their shirts to display them when people came to visit, they compared them with those of others who had suffocated from excesses of joy, and for the rest of their days they would describe and describe again the angelic visions they had seen under the influence of chloroform. On the other hand, no one ever learned about the visions of those who did not return, including the saddest of them all: those who had died as exiles in the tuberculosis pavilion, more from the sadness of the rain than because of the complications of their disease. If he had been forced to choose, Florentino Ariza did not know which fate he would have wanted for Fermina Daza. More than any-thing else he wanted the truth, but no matter how unbearable, and regardless of how he searched, he could not find it. It was incon-ceivable to him that no one could even give him a hint that would confirm the story he had heard. In the world of riverboats, which was his world, no mystery could be maintained, no secret could be kept. And yet no one had heard anything about the woman in the black veil. No one knew anything in a city where everything was known, and where many things were known even before they hap-pened, above all if they concerned the rich. But no one had any explanation for the disappearance of Fermina Daza. Florentino Ariza continued to patrol La Manga, continued to hear Mass without de-votion in the basilica of the seminary, continued to attend civic ceremonies that never would have interested him in another state of mind, but the passage of time only increased the credibility of the story he had heard. Everything seemed normal in the Urbino house-hold, except for the mother's absence. As he carried on his investigation, he learned about other events he had not known of or into which he had made no inquiries, including the death of Lorenzo Daza in the Cantabrian village where he had been born. He remembered seeing him for many years in the rowdy chess wars at the Parish Cafe, hoarse with so much talking, and growing fatter and rougher as he sank into the quicksand of an un-fortunate old age. They had never exchanged another word since their disagreeable breakfast of anise in the previous century, and Florentino Ariza was certain that even after he had obtained for his daughter the successful marriage that had become his only reason for living, Lorenzo Daza remembered him with as much rancor as he felt toward Lorenzo Daza. But he was so determined to find out the unequivocal facts regarding Fermina Daza's health that he re-turned to the Parish Cafe to learn them from her father, just at the time of the historic tournament in which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour alone confron ted forty-two opponents. This was how he discovered that Lorenzo Daza had died, and he rejoiced with all his heart, although the price of his joy might be having to live without the truth. At last he accepted as true the story of the hospital for the terminally ill, and his only consolation was the old saying: Sick women live forever. On the days when he felt disheartened, he re-signed himself to the notion that the news of Fermina Daza's death, if it should occur, would find him without his having to look for it. It never did, for Fermina Daza was alive and well on the ranch, half a league from the village of Flores de Maria, where her Cousin Hildebranda Sanchez was living, forgotten by the world. She had left with no scandal, by mutual agreement with her husband, both of them as entangled as adolescents in the only serious crisis they had suffered during so many years of stable matrimony. It had taken them by surprise in the repose of their maturity, when they felt themselves safe from misfortune's sneak attacks, their children grown and well-behaved, and the future ready for them to learn how to be old without bitterness. It had been something so unexpected for them both that they wanted to resolve it not with shouts, tears, and intermediaries, as was the custom in the Caribbean, but with the wisdom of the nations of Europe, and there was so much vacillation as to whether their loyalties lay here or over there that they ended up mired in a puerile situation that did not belong anywhere. At la st 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. Fermina Daza, in fact, had sailed at midnight in the greatest secrecy and with her face covered by a black mantilla, not on a Cunard liner bound for Panama, however, but on the regular boat to San Juan de la Cienaga, the city where she had been born and had lived until her adolescence, and for which she felt a growing home-sickness that became more and more difficult to bear as the years went by. In defiance of her husband's will, and of the customs of the day, her only companion was a fifteen-year-old goddaughter who had been raised as a family servant, but the ship captains and the officials at each port had been notified of her journey. When she made her rash decision, she told her children that she was going to have a change of scene for three months or so with Aunt Hildebranda, but her determination was not to return. Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew the strength of her character very well, and he was so troubled that he accepted her decision with humility as God's punishment for the gravi ty of his sins. But the lights on the boat had not yet been lost to view when they both repented of their weakness. Although they maintained a formal correspondence concerning their children and other household matters, almost two years went by before either one could find a way back that was not mined with pride. During the second year, the children went to spend their school vacation in Flores de Maria, and Fermina Daza did the impossible and appeared content with her new life. That at least was the conclusion drawn by Juvenal Urbino from his son's letters. Moreover, at that time the Bishop of Riohacha went there on a pastoral visit, riding under the pallium on his celebrated white mule with the trappings embroidered in gold. Behind him came pilgrims from remote regions, musicians playing accordions, peddlers selling food and amulets; and for three days the ranch was overflowing with the crippled and the hopeless, who in reality did not come for the learned sermons and the plenary indulgences but for the favors of the mule who, it was said, performed miracles behind his master's back. The Bishop had frequented the home of the Urbino de la Calle family ever since his days as an ordinary priest, and one afternoon he escaped from the public festivities to have lunch at Hildebranda's ranch. After the meal, during which they spoke only of earthly matters, he took Fermina Daza aside and asked to hear her confession. She refused in an amiable but firm manner, with the explicit argument that she had nothing to repent of. Although it was not her purpose, at least not her con-scious purpose, she was certain that her answer would reach the appropriate ears. Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say, not without a certain cynicism, that it was not he who was to blame for those two bitter years of his life but his wife's bad habit of smelling the clothes her family took off, and the clothes that she herself took off, so that she could tell by the odor if they needed to be laundered even though they might appear to be clean. She had done this ever since she was a girl, and she never thought it worthy of comment until her husband realized what she was doing on their wedding night. He also knew that she locked herself in the bathroom at least three times a day to smoke, but this did not attract his attention because the women of his class were in the habit of locking themselves away in groups to talk about men and smoke, and even to drink as much as two liters of aguardiente until they had passed out on the floor in a brickmason's drunken stupor. But her habit of sniffing at all the clothing she hap-pened across seemed to him not only inappropriate but unhealthy as well. She took it as a joke, which is what she did with everything she did not care to discuss, and she said that God had not put that diligent oriole's beak on her face just for decoration. One morning, while she was at the market, the servants aroused the entire neighbor-hood in their search for her three-year-old son, who was not to be found anywhere in the house. She arrived in the middle of the panic, turned around two or three times like a tracking mastiff, and found the boy asleep in an armoire where no one thought he could possibly be hiding. When her astonished husband asked her how she had found him, she replied: “By the smell of caca.” The truth is that her sense of smell not only served her in regard to washing clothes or finding lost children: it was the sense that oriented her in all areas of life, above all in her social life. Juvenal Urbino had observed this throughout his marriage, in particular at the beginning, when she was the parvenu in a milieu that had been prejudiced against her for three hundred years, and yet she had made her way through coral reefs as sharp as knives, not colliding with anyone, with a power over the world that could only be a super-natural instinct. That frightening faculty, which could just as well have had its origin in a millenarian wisdom as in a heart of stone, met its moment of misfortune one ill-fated Sunday before Mass when, out of simple habit, Fermina Daza sniffed the clothing her husband had worn the evening before and experienced the disturbing sensation that she had been in bed with another man. First she smelled the jacket and the vest while she took the watch chain out of the buttonhole and removed the pencil holder and the billfold and the loose change from the pockets and placed everything on the dresser, and then she smelled the hemmed shirt as she removed the tiepin and the topaz cuff links and the gold collar button, and then she smelled the trousers as she removed the keyholder with its eleven keys and the penknife with its mother-of-pearl handle, and finally she smelled the underwear and the socks and the linen handkerchief with the embroidered monogram. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there was an odor in each of the articles that had not been there in all their years of life together, an odor impossible to define because it was not the scent of flowers or of artificial essences but of something peculiar to human nature. She said nothing, and she did not notice the odor every day, but she now sniffed at her husband's clothing not to decide if it was ready to launder but with an un-bearable anxiety that gnawed at her innermost being. Fermina Daza did not know where to locate the odor of his clothing in her husband's routine. It could not be placed between his morning class and lunch, for she supposed that no woman in her right mind would make hurried love at that time of day, least of all with a visitor, when the house still had to be cleaned, and the beds made, and the marketing done, and lunch prepared, and perhaps with the added worry that one of the children would be sent home early from school because somebody threw a stone at him and hurt his head and he would find her at eleven o'clock in the morning, naked in the unmade bed and, to make matters worse, with a doctor on top of her. She also knew that Dr. Juvenal Urbino made love only at night, better yet in absolute darkness, and as a last resort before breakfast when the first birds began to chirp. After that time, as he would say, it was more work than the pleasure of daytime love was worth to take off one's clothes and put them back on again. So that the contamination of his clothing could occur only during one of his house calls or during some moment stolen from his nights of chess and films. This last possibility was difficult to prove, because unlike so many of her friends, Fermina Daza was too proud to spy on her husband or to ask someone else to do it for her. His schedule of house calls, which seemed best suited to infidelity, was also the easiest to keep an eye on, because Dr. Juvenal Urbino kept a detailed record of each of his patients, including the payment of his fees, from the first time he visited them until he ushered them out of this world with a final sign of the cross and some words for the salvation of their souls. In the three weeks that followed, Fermina Daza did not find the odor in his clothing for a few days, she found it again when she least expected it, and then she found it, stronger than ever, for several days in a row, although one of those days was a Sunday when there had been a family gathering and the two of them had not been apart for even a moment. Contrary to her normal custom and even her own desires, she found herself in her husband's office one after-noon as if she were someone else, doing something that she would never do, deciphering with an exquisite Bengalese magnifying glass his intricate notes on the house calls he had made during the last few months. It was the first time she had gone alone into that office, saturated with showers of creosote and crammed with books bound in the hides of unknown animals, blurred school pictures, honorary degrees, astrolabes, and elaborately worked daggers collected over the years: a secret sanctuary that she always considered the only part of her husband's private life to which she had no access because it was not part of love, so that the few times she had been there she had gone with him, and the visits had always been very brief. She did not feel she had the right to go in alone, much less to engage in what seemed to be indecent prying. But there she was. She wanted to find the truth, and she searched for it with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it, and she was driven by an irresistible wind even stronger than her innate haughtiness, even stronger than her dignity: an agony that bewitched her. She was able to draw no conclusions, because her husband's patients, except for mutual friends, were part of his private domain; they were people without identity, known not by their faces but by their pains, not by the color of their eyes or the evasions of their hearts but by the size of their livers, the coating on their tongues, the blood in their urine, the hallucinations of their feverish nights. They were people who believed in her husband, who believed they lived because of him when in reality they lived for him, and who in the end were reduced to a phrase written in his own hand at the bottom of the medical file: Be calm. God awaits you at the door. Fermina Daza left his study after two fruitless hours, with the feeling that she had allowed herself to be seduced by indecency. Urged on by her imagination, she began to discover changes in her husband. She found him evasive, without appetite at the table or in bed, prone to exasperation and ironic answers, and when he was at home he was no longer the tranquil man he had once been but a caged lion. For the first time since their marriage, she began to monitor the times he was late, to keep track of them to the minute, to tell him lies in order to learn the truth, but then she felt wounded to the quick by the contradictions. One night she awoke with a start, terrified by a vision of her husband staring at her in the darkness with eyes that seemed full of hatred. She had suffered a similar fright in her youth, when she had seen Florentino Ariza at the foot of her bed, but that apparition had been full of love, not hate. Besides, this time it was not fantasy: her husband was awake at two in the morning, sitting up in bed to watch her while she slept, but when she asked him why, he denied it. He lay back on the pil low and said: “You must have been dreaming.” After that night, and after similar episodes that occurred during that time, when Fermina Daza could not tell for certain where reality ended and where illusion began, she had the overwhelming revelation that she was losing her mind. At last she realized that her husband had not taken Communion on the Thursday of Corpus Christi or on any Sunday in recent weeks, and he had not found time for that year's retreats. When she asked him the reason for those unusual changes in his spiritual health, she received an evasive answer. This was the decisive clue, because he had not failed to take Communion on an important feast day since he had made his first Communion, at the age of eight. In this way she realized not only that her husband was in a state of mortal sin but that he had resolved to persist in it, since he did not go to his confessor for help. She had never imagined that she could suffer so much for something that seemed to be the absolute opposite of love, but she was suffering, and she resolved that the only way she could keep from dying was to burn out the nest of vipers that was poisoning her soul. And that is what she did. One afternoon she began to darn socks on the terrace while her husband was reading, as he did every day after his siesta. Suddenly she interrupted her work, pushed her eyeglasses up onto her forehead, and without any trace of harshness, she asked for an explanation: “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 not have 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. Juvenal Urbino knew then that the long hours of anguish were over. The moment had not been as he had foreseen it; rather than a seismic tremor in his heart, it was a calming blow, and a great relief that what was bound to happen sooner or later had happened sooner rather than later: the ghost of Miss Barbara Lynch had entered his house at last. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had met her four months earlier as she waited her turn in the clinic of Misericordia Hospital, and he knew im-mediately that something irreparable had just occurred in his destiny. She was a tall, elegant, large-boned mulatta, with skin the color and softness of molasses, and that morning she wore a red dress with white polka dots and a broad-brimmed hat of the same fabric, which shaded her face down to her eyelids. Her sex seemed more pronounced than that of other human beings. Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not attend patients in the clinic, but whenever he passed by and had time to spare, he would go in to remind his more advanced students that there is no medicine better than a good diagnosis. So that he arranged to be present at the examination of the unforeseen mulatta, making certain that his pupils would not notice any gesture of his that did not appear to be casual and barely looking at her, but fixing her name and address with care in his memory. That afternoon, af ter his last house call, he had his carriage pass by the address that she had given in the consulting room, and in fact there she was, enjoying the coolness on her terrace. It was a typical Antillean house, painted yellow even to the tin roof, with burlap windows and pots of carnations and ferns hanging in the doorway. It rested on wooden pilings in the salt marshes of Mala Crianza. A troupial sang in the cage that hung from the eaves. Across the street was a primary school, and the children rushing out obliged the coachman to keep a tight hold on the reins so that the horse would not shy. It was a stroke of luck, for Miss Barbara Lynch had time to recognize the Doctor. She waved to him as if they were old friends, she invited him to have coffee while the confusion abated, and he was delighted to accept (although it was not his custom to drink coffee) and to listen to her talk about herself, which was the only thing that had interested him since the morning and the only thing that was going to interest him, without a moment's respite, during the months to follow. Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with his wife present, that sooner or lat er he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger the stability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself, knew the strength of his moral roots, had laughed at the prediction. And now it had come true. Miss Barbara Lynch, Doctor of Theology, was the only child of the Reverend Jonathan B. Lynch, a lean black Protestant minister who rode on a mule through the poverty-stricken settlements in the salt marshes, preaching the word of one of the many gods that Dr. Juvenal Urbino wrote with a small g to distinguish them from his. She spoke good Spanish, with a certain roughness in the syntax, and her frequent slips heightened her charm. She would be twenty-eight years old in December, not long ago she had divorced another minister, who was a student of her father's and to whom she had been unhappily married for two years, and she had no desire to repeat the offense. She said: “I have no more love than my troupial.” But Dr. Urbino was too serious to think that she said it with hidden intentions. On the contrary: he asked himself in bewilderment if so many opportunities coming together might not be one of God's pitfalls, which he would then have to pay for dearly, but he dis-missed the thought without delay as a piece of theological nonsense resulting from his state of confusion. As he was about to leave, he made a casual remark about that morning's medical consultation, knowing that nothing pleases pa-tients more than talking about their ailments, and she was so splendid talking about hers that he promised he would return the next day, at four o'clock sharp, to examine her with greater care. She was dis-mayed: she knew that a doctor of his qualifications was far above her ability to pay, but he reassured her: “In this profession we try to have the rich pay for the poor.” Then he marked in his notebook: Miss Barbara Lynch, Mala Crianza Salt Marsh, Saturday, 4 pm Months later, Fermina Daza was to read that notation, augmented by details of the diagnosis, treatment, and evolution of the disease. The name attracted her attention, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was one of those dissolute artists from the New Orleans fruit boats, but the address made her think that she must come from Jamaica, a black woman, of course, and she eliminated her without a secon d thought as not being to her husband's taste. Dr. Juvenal Urbino came ten minutes early for the Saturday appointment, and Miss Lynch had not finished dressing to receive him. He had not felt so much tension since his days in Paris when he had to present himself for an oral examination. As she lay on her canvas bed, wearing a thin silk slip, Miss Lynch's beauty was endless. Everything about her was large and intense: her siren's thighs, her slow-burning skin, her astonished breasts, her diaphanous gums with their perfect teeth, her whole body radiating a vapor of good health that was the human odor Fermina Daza had discovered in her hus-band's clothing. She had gone to the clinic because she suffered from something that she, with much charm, called “twisted colons,” and Dr. Urbino thought that it was a symptom that should not be ignored. So he palpated her internal organs with more intention than attention, and as he did so he discovered in amazement that this marvelous creature was as beautiful inside as out, and then he gave himself over to the delights of touch, no longer the best-qualified physician along the Caribbean coastline but a poor soul tormented by his tumultuous instincts. Only once before in his austere professional life had some-thing similar happened to him, and that had been the day of his greatest shame, because the indignant patient had moved his hand away, sat up in bed, and said to him: “What you want may happen, but it will not be like this.” Miss Lynch, on the other hand, aban-doned herself to his hands, and when she was certain that the Doctor was no longer thinking about his science, she said: “I thought this not permitted by your ethics.” He was as drenched by perspiration as if he had just stepped out of a pool wearing all his clothes, and he dried his hands and face with a towel. “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 for poor 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 all harm 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 honor protected, she wanted security and love, in that order, and she believed that she deserved them. She gave Dr. Urbino the opportunity to seduce her but not to penetrate her inner sanctum, even when she was alone in the house. She would go no further than allowing him to repeat the ceremony of palpation and auscultation with all the ethical violations he could desire, but without taking off her clothes. For his part, he could not let go of the bait once he had bitten, and he continued his almost daily incursions. For reasons of a practical nature, it was close to impossible for him to maintain a continuing relationship with Miss Lynch, but he was too weak to stop, as he would later be too weak to go any further. This was his limit. The Reverend Lynch did not lead a regular life, for he would ride away on his mule on the spur of the moment, carrying Bibles and evangelical pamphlets on one side and provisions on the other, and he would return when least expected. Another difficulty was the school across the street, for the children would recite their lessons as they looked out the windows, and what they saw with greatest clarity was the house across the way, with its doors and windows open wide from six o'clock in the morning, they saw Miss Lynch hanging the birdcage from the eaves so that the troupial could learn the recited lessons, they saw her wearing a bright-colored turban and going about her household tasks as she recited along with them in her brilliant Caribbean voice, and later they saw her sitting on the porch, reciting the afternoon psalms by herself in English. They had to choose a time when the children were not there, and there were only two possibilities: the afternoon recess for lunch, between twelve and two, which was also when the Doctor had his lunch, or late in the afternoon, after the children had gone home. This was always the best time, although by then the Doctor had made his rounds and had only a few minutes to spare before it was time for him to eat with his family. The third problem, and the most serious for him, was his own situation. It was not possible for him to go there without his carriage, which was very well known and always had to wait outside her door. He could have made an accomplice of his coachman, as did most of his friends at the Social Club, but that was not in his nature. In fact, when his visits to Miss Lynch became too obvious, the liveried family coachman himself dared to ask if it would not be better for him to come back later so that the carriage would not spend so much time at her door. Dr. Urbino, in a s harp 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 not have,” 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 the Doctor's carriage stood at the door. At times the Doctor himself took the initiative and went on foot, if distance permitted, or in a hired carriage, to avoid malicious or premature assumptions. Such deceptions, however, were to little avail. Since the prescriptions ordered in pharmacies revealed the truth, Dr. Urbino would always prescribe counterfeit medicines along with the correct ones in order to preserve the sacred right of the sick to die in peace along with the secret of their illness. Similarly, he was able in various truthful ways to account for the presence of his carriage outside the house of Miss Lynch, but he could not allow it to stay there too long, least of all for the amount of time he would have desired, which was the rest of his life. The world became a hell for him. For once the initial madness was sated, they both became aware of the risks involved, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino never had the resolve to face a scandal. In the deliriums of passion he promised everything, but when it was over, everything was left for later. On the other hand, as his desire to be with her grew, so did his fear of losing her, so that their meetings became more and more hurried and problematic. He thought about nothing else. He waited for the afternoons with unbearable longing, he forgot his other commitments, he forgot everything but her, but as his carriage approached the Mala Crianza salt marsh he prayed to God that an unforeseen obstacle would force it to drive past. He went to her in a state of such anguish that at times as he turned the corner he was glad to catch a glimpse of the woolly head of the Reverend Lynch, who read on the terrace while his daughter cate-chized neighborhood children in the living room with recited passages of sc ripture. Then he would go home relieved that he was not defying fate again, but later he would feel himself going mad with the desire for it to be five o'clock in the afternoon all day, every day. So their love became impossible when the carriage at her door became too conspicuous, and after three months it became nothing less than ridiculous. Without time to say anything, Miss Lynch would go to the bedroom as soon as she saw her agitated lover walk in the door. She took the precaution of wearing a full skirt on the days she expected him, a charming skirt from Jamaica with red flowered ruffles, but with no underwear, nothing, in the belief that this convenience was going to help him ward off his fear. But he squandered every-thing she did to make him happy. Panting and drenched with perspiration, he rushed after her into the bedroom, throwing everything on the floor, his walking stick, his medical bag, his Panama hat, and he made panic-stricken love with his trousers down around his knees, with his jacket buttoned so that it would not get in his way, with his gold watch chain across his vest, with his shoes on, with every-thing on, and more concerned with leaving as soon as poss ible than with achieving pleasure. She was left dangling, barely at the entrance of her tunnel of solitude, while he was already buttoning up again, as exhausted as if he had made absolute love on the dividing line between life and death, when in reality he had accomplished no more than the physical act that is only a part of the feat of love. But he had finished in time: the exact time needed to give an in-jection during a routine visit. Then he returned home ashamed of his weakness, longing for death, cursing himself for the lack of courage that kept him from asking Fermina Daza to pull down his trousers and burn his ass on the brazier. He did not eat, he said his prayers without conviction, in bed he pretended to continue his siesta reading while his wife walked round and round the house putting the world in order before going to bed. As he nodded over his book, he began to sink down into the in-evitable mangrove swamp of Miss Lynch, into her air of a recumbent forest glade, his deathbed, and then he could think of nothing ex-cept tomorrow's five minutes to five o'clock in the afternoon and her waiting for him in bed with nothing but the mound of her dark bush under her madwoman's skirt from Jamaica: the hellish circle. In the past few years he had become conscious of the burden of his own body. He recognized the symptoms. He had read about them in textbooks, he had seen them confirmed in real life, in older patients with no history of serious ailments who suddenly began to describe perfect syndromes that seemed to come straight from medical texts and yet turned out to be imaginary. His professor of children's clinical medicine at La Salpetriere had recommended pediatrics as the most honest specialization, because children become sick only when in fact they are sick, and they cannot communicate with the physician using conventional words but only with concrete symptoms of real diseases. After a certain age, however, adults either had the symptoms without the diseases or, what was worse, serious diseases with the symptoms of minor ones. He distracted them with palliatives, giving time enough time to teach them not to feel their ailments, so that they could live with them in the rubbish heap of old age. Dr. Juvenal Urbino never thought that a physician his age, who believed he had seen everything, would not be able to overcome the uneasy feeling that he was ill when he was not. Or what was worse, not believe he was, out of pure scientific prejudice, when perhaps he really was. At the age of forty, half in earnest and half in jest, he had said in class: “All I need in life is someone who understands me.” But when he found himself lost in the labyrinth of Miss Lynch, he no longer was jesting. All the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearance in his body. He felt the shape of his liver with such clarity that he could tell its size without touching it. He felt the dozing cat's purr of his kidneys, he felt the iridescent brilliance of his vesicles, he felt the humming blood in his arteries. At times he awoke at dawn gasping for air, like a fish out of water. He had fluid in his heart. He felt it lose the beat for a moment, he felt it syncopate like a school marching band, once, twice, and then, because God is good, he felt it recover at last. But instead of having recourse to the same distracting remedies he gave to his patients, he went mad with terror. It was true: all he needed in life, even at the age of fifty-eight, was someone who understood him. So he turned to Fermina Daza, the person who loved him best and whom he loved best in the world, and with whom he had just eased his conscience. For this occurred after she interrupted his afternoon reading to ask him to look at her, and he had the first indication that his hellish circle had been discovered. But he did not know how, because it would have been impossible for him to conceive of Fermina Daza's learning the truth by smell alone. In any case, for a long time this had not been a good city for keeping secrets. Soon after the first home telephones were installed, several marriages that seemed stable were destroyed by anonymous tale-bearing calls, and a number of frightened families either canceled their service or refused to have a telephone for many years. Dr. Urbino knew that his wife had too much self-respect to allow so much as an attempt at anonymous betrayal by telephone, and he could not imagine anyone daring to try it under his own name. But he feared the old method: a note slipped under the door by an unknown hand could be effective, not only because it guaranteed the double anonymity of sender and receiver, but be-cause its time-honored ancestry permitted one to attribute to it some kind of metaphysical connection to the designs of Divine Providence. Jealousy was unknown in his house: during more than thirty years of conjugal peace, Dr. Urbino had often boasted in public--and until now it had been true--that he was like those Swedish matches that light only with their own box. But he did not know how a woman with as much pride, dignity, and strength of character as his wife would react in the face of proven infidelity. So that after looking at her as she had asked, nothing occurred to him but to lower his eyes again in order to hide his embarrassment and continue the pretense of being lost among the sweet, meandering rivers of Alca Island until he could think of something else. Fermina Daza, for her part, said nothing more either. When she finished darning the socks, she tossed everything into the sewing basket in no par-ticular order, gave instructions in the kitchen for supper, and went to the bedroom. Then he reached the admirable decision not to go to Miss Lynch's house at five o'clock in the afternoon. The vows of eternal love, the dream of a discreet house for her alone where he could visit her with no unexpected interruptions, their unhurried happiness for as long as they lived--everything he had promised in the blazing heat of love was canceled forever after. The last thing Miss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box wrapped in paper from the pharmacy, so that the coachman himself thought it was an emergency prescription and handed it to her with no comment, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not even by accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bitter tears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. At five o'clock, instead of going to see her, he made a profound act of contrition before his confessor, and on the following Sunday he to ok Communion, his heart broken but his soul at peace. That night, following his renunciation, as he was undressing for bed, he recited for Fermina Daza the bitter litany of his early morn-ing insomnia, his sudden stabbing pains, his desire to weep in the afternoon, the encoded symptoms of secret love, which he recounted as if they were the miseries of old age. He had to tell someone or die, or else tell the truth, and so the relief he obtained was sanctified within the domestic rituals of love. She listened to him with close attention, but without looking at him, without saying anything as she picked up every article of clothing he removed, sniffed it with no gesture or change of expression that might betray her wrath, then crumpled it and tossed it into the wicker basket for dirty clothes. She did not find the odor, but it was all the same: tomorrow was another day. Before he knelt down to pray before the altar in the bedroom, he ended the recital of his misery with a sigh as mournful as it was sincere: “I think I am going to die.” She d id 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 of dying, and she had made the same brutal reply. Dr. Urbino attributed it to the natural hardheartedness of women, which allows the earth to continue revolving around the sun, because at that time he did not know that she always erected a barrier of wrath to hide her fear. And in this case it was the most terrible one of all, the fear of losing him. That night, on the other hand, she wished him dead with all her heart, and this certainty alarmed him. Then he heard her slow sobbing in the darkness as she bit the pillow so he would not hear. He was puzzled, because he knew that she did not cry easily for any affliction of body or soul. She cried only in rage, above all if it had its origins in her terror of culpability, and then the more she cried the more enraged she became, because she could never forgive her weakness in crying. He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run through by a spear, and he did not have the courage to tell her that the reason for her weeping had disappeared that afternoon, had been pulled out by the roots, forever, even from his memory. Fatigue overcame him for a few minutes. When he awoke, she had lit her dim bedside lamp and lay there with her eyes open, but without crying. Something definitive had happened to her while he slept: the sediment that had accumulated at the bottom of her life over the course of so many years had been stirred up by the torment of her jealousy and had floated to the surface, and it had aged her all at once. Shocked by her sudden wrinkles, her faded lips, the ashes in her hair, he risked telling her that she should try to sleep: it was after two o'clock. She spoke, not looking at him but with no trace of rage in her voice, almost with gentleness. “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 his shoulders, because he was convinced that she already knew and only needed to confirm the details. But she did not, of course, so that as he spoke she began to cry again, not with her earlier timid sobs but with abundant salty tears that ran down her cheeks and burned her nightdress and inflamed her life, because he had not done what she, with her heart in her mouth, had hoped he would do, which was to be a man: deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and grow indignant at the false accusation, and shout curses at this ill-begotten society that did not hesitate to trample on one's honor, and remain imperturbable even when faced with crushing proofs of his disloyalty. Then, when he told her that he had been with his confessor that afternoon, she feared she would go blind with rage. Ever since her days at the Academy she had been convinced that the men and women of the Church la cked any virtue inspired by God. This was a discordant note in the harmony of the house, which they had managed to over-look without mishap. But her husband's allowing his confessor to be privy to an intimacy that was not only his but hers as well was more than she could bear. “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 honor was the subject of gossip even before her husband had finished his penance, and the feeling of humiliation that this produced in her was much less tolerable than the shame and anger and injustice caused by his infidelity. And worst of all, damn it: with a black woman. He corrected her: “With a mulatta.” But by then it was too late for accuracy: she had finished. “Just as bad,” she said, “and only now I understand: it was the smell of a black woman.” This happened on a Monday. On Friday at seven o'clock in the evening, Fermina Daza sailed away on the regular boat to San Juan de la Cienaga with only one trunk, in the company of her god-daughter, her face covered by a mantilla to avoid questions for herself and her husband. Dr. Juvenal Urbino was not at the dock, by mutual agreement, following an exhausting three-day discussion in which they decided that she should go to Cousin Hildebranda San-chez's ranch in Flores de Maria for as long a time as she needed to think before coming to a final decision. Without knowing her reasons, the children understood it as a trip she had often put off and that they themselves had wanted her to make for a long time. Dr. Urbino arranged matters so that no one in his perfidious circle could engage in malicious speculation, and he did it so well that if Florentino Ariza could find no clue to Fermina Daza's disappearance it was because in fact there was none, not because he lacked the means to investiga te. Her husband had no doubts that she would come home as soon as she got over her rage. But she left certain that her rage would never end.