Love in the Time of Cholera 精彩片段：
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DAY THAT Florentino Ariza saw Fermina Daza in the atrium of the Cathedral, in the sixth month of her pregnancy and in full command of her new condition as a woman of the world, he made a fierce decision to win fame and fortune in order to deserve her. He did not even stop to think about the obstacle of her being married, because at the same time he decided, as if it depended on himself alone, that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had to die. He did not know when or how, but he considered it an ineluctable event that he was resolved to wait for without impatience or violence, even till the end of time.
He began at the beginning. He presented himself unannounced in the office of Uncle Leo XII, President of the Board of Directors and General Manager of the River Company of the Caribbean, and ex-pressed his willingness to yield to his plans. His uncle was angry with him because of the manner in which he had thrown away the good position of telegraph operator in Villa de Leyva, but he allowed him-self to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. Besides, his brother’s widow had died the year before, still smarting from rancor but without any heirs. And so he gave the job to his errant nephew.
It was a decision typical of Don Leo XII Loayza. Inside the shell of a soulless merchant was hidden a genial lunatic, as willing to bring forth a spring of lemonade in the Guajira Desert as to flood a solemn funeral with weeping at his heartbreaking rendition of “In Questa Tomba Oscura.” His head was covered with curls, he had the lips of a faun, and all he needed was a lyre and a laurel wreath to be the image of the incendiary Nero of Christian mythology. When he was not occupied with the administration of his decrepit vessels, still afloat out of sheer distraction on the part of fate, or with the problems of river navigation, which grew more and more critical every day, he devoted his free time to the enrichment of his lyric repertoire. He liked nothing better than to sing at funerals. He had the voice of a galley slave, untrained but capable of impressive registers.
Someone had told him that Enrico Caruso could shatter a vase with the power of his voice, and he had spent years trying to imitate him, even with the windowpanes. His friends brought him the most delicate vases they had come across in their travels through the world, and they organized special parties so that he might at last achieve the culmina-tion of his dream. He never succeeded. Still, in the depth of his thun-dering there was a glimmer of tenderness that broke the hearts of his listeners as if they were the crystal vases of the great Caruso, and it was this that made him so revered at funerals. Except at one, when he thought it a good idea to sing “When I Wake Up in Glory,” a beauti-ful and moving funeral song from Louisiana, and he was told to be quiet by the priest, who could not understand that Protestant intru-sion in his church.
And so, between operatic encores and Neapolitan serenades, his creative talent and his invincible entrepreneurial spirit made him the hero of river navigation during the time of its greatest splendor. He had come from nothing, like his dead brothers, and all of them went as far as they wished despite the stigma of being illegitimate children and, even worse, illegitimate children who had never been recognized. They were the cream of what in those days was called the “shop-counter aristocracy,” whose sanctuary was the Commercial Club. And yet, even when he had the resources to live like the Roman emperor he resembled, Uncle Leo XII lived in the old city because it was convenient to his business, in such an austere manner and in such a plain house that he could never shake off an unmerited reputation for miserliness. His only luxury was even simpler: a house by the sea, two leagues from his offices, furnished only with six handmade stools, a stand for earthenware jars, and a hammock on the terrace where he could lie down to think on Sundays. No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich.
“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
His strange nature, which someone once praised in a speech as lucid dementia, allowed him to see in an instant what no one else ever saw in Florentino Ariza. From the day he came to his office to ask for work, with his doleful appearance and his twenty-six useless years behind him, he had tested him with the severity of a barracks train-ing that could have broken the hardest man. But he did not intimidate him. What Uncle Leo XII never suspected was that his nephew’s courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indif-ference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.
The worst years were the early ones, when he was appointed clerk to the Board of Directors, which seemed a position made to order for him. Lotario Thugut, Uncle Leo XII’s old music teacher, was the one who advised him to give his nephew a writing job be-cause he was a voracious wholesale consumer of literature, although he preferred the worst to the best. Uncle Leo XII disregarded what he said concerning his nephew’s bad taste in reading, for Lotario Thugut would also say of him that he had been his worst voice student, and still he could make even tombstones cry. In any case, the German was correct in regard to what he had thought about least, which was that Florentino Ariza wrote everything with so much passion that even official documents seemed to be about love. His bills of lading were rhymed no matter how he tried to avoid it, and routine busi-ness letters had a lyrical spirit that diminished their authority. His uncle himself came to his office one day with a packet of correspon-dence that he had not dared put his name to, and he gave him his last chance to save his soul.
“If you cannot write a business letter you will pick up the trash on the dock,” he said.
Florentino Ariza accepted the challenge. He made a supreme effort to learn the mundane simplicity of mercantile prose, imitating models from notarial files with the same diligence he had once used for popular poets. This was the period when he spent his free time in the Arcade of the Scribes, helping unlettered lovers to write their scented love notes, in order to unburden his heart of all the words of love that he could not use in customs reports. But at the end of six months, no matter how hard he twisted, he could not wring the neck of his die-hard swan. So that when Uncle Leo XII reproached him a second time, he admitted defeat, but with a certain haughtiness.
“Love is the only thing that interests me,” he said.
“The trouble,” his uncle said to him, “is that without river navi-gation there is no love.”
He kept his threat to have him pick up trash on the dock, but he gave him his word that he would promote him, step by step, up the ladder of faithful service until he found his place. And he did. No work could defeat him, no matter how hard or humiliating it was, no salary, no matter how miserable, could demoralize him, and he never lost his essential fearlessness when faced with the insolence of his superiors. But he was not an innocent, either: everyone who crossed his path suffered the consequences of the overwhelming determina-tion, capable of anything, that lay behind his helpless appearance. Just as Uncle Leo XII had foreseen, and according to his desire that his nephew not be ignorant of any secret in the business, Florentino Ariza moved through every post during thirty years of dedication and tenacity in the face of every trial.
He fulfilled all his duties with admirable skill, studying every thread in that mysterious warp that had so much to do with the offices of poetry, but he never won the honor he most desired, which was to write one, just one, acceptable business letter. Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet. That, at least, is what he was told by Uncle Leo XII, who talked to him about his father during moments of sentimental leisure and created an image that resembled a dreamer more than it did a businessman.