Love in the Time of Cholera (18 page)

“You are like a new-sprung rose,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Thank God,” he said, and he misquoted St. Thomas: “Remember that everything that is good,
whatever its origin, comes from the Holy Spirit. Do you like music?”

“What is the point of that question?” she asked in turn.

“Music is important for one’s health,” he said.

He really thought it was, and she was going to know very soon, and for the rest of her life, that the topic of music was almost a magic formula that he used to propose friendship, but at that moment she interpreted it as
a joke. Besides, her two friends, who had pretended to paint while she and Dr. Juvenal Urbino were talking at the window, tittered and hid their faces behind their palettes, and this made Fermina Daza lose her self-control. Blind with fury, she slammed the window shut. The Doctor stared at the sheer lace curtains in bewilderment, he tried to find the street door but lost his way, and in his confusion
he knocked into the cage with the perfumed crows. They broke into sordid shrieking, flapped their wings in fright, and saturated the Doctor’s clothing with a feminine fragrance. The thundering voice of Lorenzo Daza rooted him to the spot:

“Doctor—wait for me there.”

He had seen everything from the upper floor and, swollen and livid, he came down the stairs buttoning his shirt, his side-whiskers
still in an uproar after a restless siesta. The Doctor tried to overcome his embarrassment.

“I told your daughter that she is like a rose.”

“True enough,” said Lorenzo Daza, “but one with too many thorns.”

He walked past Dr. Urbino without greeting him. He pushed open the sewing room window and shouted a rough command to his daughter:

“Come here and beg the Doctor’s pardon.”

The Doctor tried
to intervene and stop him, but Lorenzo Daza paid no attention to him. He insisted: “Hurry up.” She looked at her friends with a secret plea for understanding, and she said to her father that she had nothing to beg pardon for, she had only closed the window to keep out the sun. Dr. Urbino, with good humor, tried to confirm her words, but Lorenzo Daza insisted that he be obeyed. Then Fermina Daza,
pale with rage, turned toward the window, and extending her right foot as she raised her skirt with her fingertips, she made a theatrical curtsy to the Doctor.

“I give you my most heartfelt apologies, sir,” she said.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino imitated her with good humor, making a cavalier’s flourish with his top hat, but he did not win the compassionate smile he had hoped for. Then Lorenzo Daza invited
him to have a cup of coffee in his office to set things right, and he accepted with pleasure so that there would be no doubt whatsoever that he did not harbor a shred of resentment in his heart.

The truth was that Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not drink coffee, except for a cup first thing in the morning. He did not drink alcohol either, except for a glass of wine with meals on solemn occasions, but
he not only drank down the coffee that Lorenzo Daza offered him, he also accepted a glass of anisette. Then he accepted another coffee with another anisette, and then another and another, even though he still had to make a few more calls. At first he listened with attention to the excuses that Lorenzo Daza continued to offer in the name of his daughter, whom he defined as an intelligent and serious
girl, worthy of a prince whether he came from here or anywhere else, whose only defect, so he said, was her mulish character. But after the second anisette, the Doctor thought he heard Fermina Daza’s voice at the other end of the patio, and his imagination went after
her, followed her through the night that had just descended in the house as she lit the lights in the corridor, fumigated the bedrooms
with the insecticide bomb, uncovered the pot of soup on the stove, which she was going to share that night with her father, the two of them alone at the table, she not raising her eyes, not tasting the soup, not breaking the rancorous spell, until he was forced to give in and ask her to forgive his severity that afternoon.

Dr. Urbino knew enough about women to realize that Fermina Daza would
not pass by the office until he left, but he stayed nevertheless because he felt that wounded pride would give him no peace after the humiliations of the afternoon. Lorenzo Daza, who by now was almost drunk, did not seem to notice his lack of attention, for he was satisfied with his own indomitable eloquence. He talked at full gallop, chewing the flower of his unlit cigar, coughing in shouts, trying
to clear his throat, attempting with great difficulty to find a comfortable position in the swivel chair, whose springs wailed like an animal in heat. He had drunk three glasses of anisette to each one drunk by his guest, and he paused only when he realized that they could no longer see each other, and he stood up to light the lamp. Dr. Juvenal Urbino looked at him in the new light, he saw that
one eye was twisted like a fish’s and that his words did not correspond to the movement of his lips, and he thought these were hallucinations brought on by his abuse of alcohol. Then he stood up, with the fascinating sensation that he was inside a body that belonged not to him but to someone who was still in the chair where he had been sitting, and he had to make a great effort not to lose his mind.

It was after seven o’clock when he left the office, preceded by Lorenzo Daza. There was a full moon. The patio, idealized by anisette, floated at the bottom of an aquarium, and the cages covered with cloths looked like ghosts sleeping under the hot scent of new orange blossoms. The sewing room window was open, there was a lighted lamp on the worktable, and the unfinished paintings were on their
easels as if they were on exhibit. “Where art thou that thou art not here,” said Dr. Urbino as he passed by, but Fermina Daza did not hear him, she could not hear him, because she was crying with rage in her bedroom, lying face down on the bed and waiting for her father so that she could make him pay for the afternoon’s humiliation. The Doctor did not renounce his hope of saying goodbye
to her,
but Lorenzo Daza did not suggest it. He yearned for the innocence of her pulse, her cat’s tongue, her tender tonsils, but he was disheartened by the idea that she never wanted to see him again and would never permit him to try to see her. When Lorenzo Daza walked into the entryway, the crows, awake under their sheets, emitted a funereal shriek. “They will peck out your eyes,” the Doctor said aloud,
thinking of her, and Lorenzo Daza turned around to ask him what he had said.

“It was not me,” he said. “It was the anisette.”

Lorenzo Daza accompanied him to his carriage, trying to force him to accept a gold peso for the second visit, but he would not take it. He gave the correct instructions to the driver for taking him to the houses of the two patients he still had to see, and he climbed
into the carriage without help. But he began to feel sick as they bounced along the cobbled streets, so that he ordered the driver to take a different route. He looked at himself for a moment in the carriage mirror and saw that his image, too, was still thinking about Fermina Daza. He shrugged his shoulders. Then he belched, lowered his head to his chest, and fell asleep, and in his dream he began
to hear funeral bells. First he heard those of the Cathedral and then he heard those of all the other churches, one after another, even the cracked pots of St. Julian the Hospitaler.

“Shit,” he murmured in his sleep, “the dead have died.”

His mother and sisters were having
café con leche
and crullers for supper at the formal table in the large dining room when they saw him appear in the door,
his face haggard and his entire being dishonored by the whorish perfume of the crows. The largest bell of the adjacent Cathedral resounded in the immense empty space of the house. His mother asked him in alarm where in the world he had been, for they had looked everywhere for him so that he could attend General Ignacio María, the last grandson of the Marquis de Jaraíz de la Vera, who had been struck
down that afternoon by a cerebral hemorrhage: it was for him that the bells were tolling. Dr. Juvenal Urbino listened to his mother without hearing her as he clutched the doorframe, and then he gave a half turn, trying to reach his bedroom, but he fell flat on his face in an explosion of star anise vomit.

“Mother of God,” shouted his mother. “Something very strange
must have happened for you
to show up in your own house in this state.”

The strangest thing, however, had not yet occurred. Taking advantage of the visit of the famous pianist Romeo Lussich, who played a cycle of Mozart sonatas as soon as the city had recovered from mourning the death of General Ignacio María, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had the piano from the Music School placed in a mule-drawn wagon and brought a history-making
serenade to Fermina Daza. She was awakened by the first measures, and she did not have to look out the grating on the balcony to know who was the sponsor of that uncommon tribute. The only thing she regretted was not having the courage of other harassed maidens, who emptied their chamber pots on the heads of unwanted suitors. Lorenzo Daza, on the other hand, dressed without delay as the serenade
was playing, and when it was over he had Dr. Juvenal Urbino and the pianist, still wearing their formal concert clothes, come in to the visitors’ parlor, where he thanked them for the serenade with a glass of good brandy.

Fermina Daza soon realized that her father was trying to soften her heart. The day after the serenade, he said to her in a casual manner: “Imagine how your mother would feel
if she knew you were being courted by an Urbino de la Calle.” Her dry response was: “She would turn over in her grave.” The friends who painted with her told her that Lorenzo Daza had been invited to lunch at the Social Club by Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who had received a severe reprimand for breaking club rules. It was only then that she learned that her father had applied for membership in the Social
Club on several occasions, and that each time he had been rejected with such a large number of black balls that another attempt was not possible. But Lorenzo Daza had an infinite capacity for assimilating humiliations, and he continued his ingenious strategies for arranging casual encounters with Juvenal Urbino, not realizing that it was Juvenal Urbino who went out of his way to let himself be encountered.
At times they spent hours chatting in the office, while the house seemed suspended at the edge of time because Fermina Daza would not permit anything to run its normal course until he left. The Parish Café was a good intermediate haven. It was there that Lorenzo Daza gave Juvenal Urbino his first lessons in chess, and he was such a
diligent pupil that chess became an incurable addiction that tormented
him until the day of his death.

One night, a short while after the serenade by solo piano, Lorenzo Daza discovered a letter, its envelope sealed with wax, in the entryway to his house. It was addressed to his daughter and the monogram “J.U.C.” was imprinted on the seal. He slipped it under the door as he passed Fermina’s bedroom, and she never understood how it had come there, since it was inconceivable
to her that her father had changed so much that he would bring her a letter from a suitor. She left it on the night table, for the truth was she did not know what to do with it, and there it stayed, unopened, for several days, until one rainy afternoon when Fermina Daza dreamed that Juvenal Urbino had returned to the house to give her the tongue depressor he had used to examine her throat.
In the dream, the tongue depressor was made not of aluminum but of a delicious metal that she had tasted with pleasure in other dreams, so that she broke it in two unequal pieces and gave him the smaller one.

When she awoke she opened the letter. It was brief and proper, and all that Juvenal Urbino asked was permission to request her father’s permission to visit her. She was impressed by its
simplicity and seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many days faded away on the spot. She kept the letter in the bottom of her trunk, but she remembered that she had also kept Florentino Ariza’s perfumed letters there, and she took it out of the chest to find another place for it, shaken by a rush of shame. Then it seemed that the most decent thing to do was to pretend
she had not received it, and she burned it in the lamp, watching how the drops of wax exploded into blue bubbles above the flame. She sighed: “Poor man.” And then she realized that it was the second time she had said those words in little more than a year, and for a moment she thought about Florentino Ariza, and even she was surprised at how removed he was from her life: poor man.

Three more
letters arrived with the last rains in October, the first of them accompanied by a little box of violet pastilles from Flavigny Abbey. Two had been delivered at the door by Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s coachman, and the Doctor had greeted Gala Placidia from the carriage window, first so that there would be no doubt that the
letters were his, and second so that no one could tell him they had not been received.
Moreover, both of them were sealed with his monogram in wax and written in the cryptic scrawl that Fermina Daza already recognized as a physician’s handwriting. Both of them said in substance what had been said in the first, and were conceived in the same submissive spirit, but underneath their propriety one could begin to detect an impatience that was never evident in the parsimonious letters
of Florentino Ariza. Fermina Daza read them as soon as they were delivered, two weeks apart, and without knowing why, she changed her mind as she was about to throw them into the fire. But she never thought of answering them.

The third letter in October had been slipped under the street door, and was in every way different from the previous ones. The handwriting was so childish that there was
no doubt it had been scrawled with the left hand, but Fermina Daza did not realize that until the text itself proved to be a poison pen letter. Whoever had written it took for granted that Fermina Daza had bewitched Dr. Juvenal Urbino with her love potions, and from that supposition sinister conclusions had been drawn. It ended with a threat: if Fermina Daza did not renounce her efforts to move up
in the world by means of the most desirable man in the city, she would be exposed to public disgrace.