Love in the Time of Cholera_CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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