Love in the Time of Cholera (44 page)

“Tell me something, lionlady of my soul,” asked Florentino Ariza. “How would you feel if you received a love letter written on that thing?”

Her expression—she who was no longer surprised at anything—was one of genuine surprise.

“My God, man!” she exclaimed. “It never occurred
to me.”

For
that very reason she could make no other reply. Florentino Ariza had not thought of it either until that moment, and he decided to risk it with no reservations. He took one of the office typewriters home, his subordinates joking good-naturedly: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Leona Cassiani, enthusiastic about anything new, offered to give him typing lessons at home. But
he had been opposed to methodical learning ever since Lotario Thugut had wanted to teach him to play the violin by reading notes and warned him that he would need at least a year to begin, five more to qualify for a professional orchestra, and six hours a day for the rest of his life in order to play well. And yet he had convinced his mother to buy him a blind man’s violin, and with the five basic
rules given him by Lotario Thugut, in less than a year he had dared to play in the choir of the Cathedral and to serenade Fermina Daza from the paupers’ cemetery according to the direction of the winds. If that had been the case at the age of twenty, with something as difficult as the violin, he did not see why it could not also be the case at the age of seventy-six, with a one-finger instrument
like the typewriter.

He was right. He needed three days to learn the position of the letters on the keyboard, another six to learn to think while he typed, and three more to complete the first letter without errors after tearing up half a ream of paper. He gave it a solemn salutation—
Señora
—and signed it with his initial, as he had done in the perfumed love letters of his youth. He mailed it
in an envelope with the mourning vignettes that were de rigueur for a letter to a recent widow, and with no return address on the back.

It was a six-page letter, unlike any he had ever written before. It did not have the tone, or the style, or the rhetorical air of his early years of love, and his argument was so rational and measured that the scent of a gardenia would have been out of place.
In a certain sense it was his closest approximation to the business letters he had never been able to write. Years later, a typed personal letter would be considered almost an insult, but at that time the typewriter was still an office animal without its own code of ethics, and its domestication for personal use was not foreseen in the books on etiquette. It seemed more like bold modernity, which
was how Fermina Daza must have understood it, for in her second letter to Florentino Ariza, she began by begging his pardon for any difficulties in reading her handwriting,
since she did not have at her disposal any means more advanced than her steel pen.

Florentino Ariza did not even refer to the terrible letter that she had sent him, but from the very beginning he attempted a new method of
seduction, without any reference to past loves or even to the past itself: a clean slate. Instead, he wrote an extensive meditation on life based on his ideas about, and experience of, relations between men and women, which at one time he had intended to write as a complement to the
Lovers’ Companion
. Only now he disguised it in the patriarchal style of an old man’s memories so that it would not
be too obvious that it was really a document of love. First he wrote many drafts in his old style, which took longer to read with a cool head than to throw into the fire. But he knew that any conventional slip, the slightest nostalgic indiscretion, could revive the unpleasant taste of the past in her heart, and although he foresaw her returning a hundred letters to him before she dared open the
first, he preferred that it not happen even once. And so he planned everything down to the last detail, as if it were the final battle: new intrigues, new hopes in a woman who had already lived a full and complete life. It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone’s.
It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.

He had the good sense not to expect an immediate reply, to be satisfied if the letter was not returned to him. It was not, nor were any of the ones that followed, and as the days passed, his excitement grew, for the more days that passed without her letters being returned,
the greater his hope of a reply. In the beginning, the frequency of his letters was conditioned by the dexterity of his fingers: first one a week, then two, and at last one a day. He was happy about the progress made in the mail service since his days as a standard-bearer, for he would not have risked being seen every day in the post office mailing a letter to the same person, or sending it
with someone who might talk. On the other hand, it was very easy to send an employee to buy enough stamps for a month, and then slip the letter into one of the three mailboxes located in the old city. He soon made that ritual a part of his routine: he took advantage of his insomnia to write, and
the next day, on his way to the office, he would ask the driver to stop for a moment at a corner box,
and he would get out to mail the letter. He never allowed the chauffeur to do it for him, as he attempted to do one rainy morning, and at times he took the precaution of carrying several letters rather than just one, so that it would seem more natural. The chauffeur did not know, of course, that the additional letters were blank pages that Florentino Ariza addressed to himself, for he had never
carried on a private correspondence with anyone, with the exception of the guardian’s report that he sent at the end of each month to the parents of América Vicuña, with his personal impressions of the girl’s conduct, her state of mind and health, and the progress she was making in her studies.

After the first month he began to number the letters and to head them with a synopsis of the previous
ones, as in the serialized novels in the newspapers, for fear that Fermina Daza would not realize that they had a certain continuity. When they became daily letters, moreover, he replaced the envelopes that had mourning vignettes with long white envelopes, and this gave them the added impersonality of business letters. When he began, he was prepared to subject his patience to a crucial test, at
least until he had proof that he was wasting his time with the only new approach he could think of. He waited, in fact, not with the many kinds of suffering that waiting had caused him in his youth, but with the stubbornness of an old man made of stone who had nothing else to think about, nothing else to do in a riverboat company that by this time was sailing without his help before favorable winds,
and who was also convinced that he would be alive and in perfect possession of his male faculties the next day, or the day after that, or whenever Fermina Daza at last was convinced that there was no other remedy for her solitary widow’s yearnings than to lower the drawbridge for him.

Meanwhile, he continued with his normal life. In anticipation of a favorable reply, he began a second renovation
of his house so that it would be worthy of the woman who could have considered herself its lady and mistress from the day of its purchase. He visited Prudencia Pitre again several times, as he had promised, in order to prove to her that he loved her despite the devastation wrought by age, loved her in full sunlight and with the doors open, and not only on his nights of desolation. He continued
to pass by Andrea Varón’s house until he
found the bathroom light turned off, and he tried to lose himself in the wildness of her bed even though it was only so he would not lose the habit of love, in keeping with another of his superstitions, not disproved so far, that the body carries on for as long as you do.

His relations with América Vicuña were the only difficulty. He had repeated the order
to his chauffeur to pick her up on Saturdays at ten o’clock in the morning at the school, but he did not know what to do with her during the weekends. For the first time he did not concern himself with her, and she resented the change. He placed her in the care of the servant girls and had them take her to the afternoon film, to the band concerts in the children’s park, to the charity bazaars,
or he arranged Sunday activities for her and her classmates so that he would not have to take her to the hidden paradise behind his offices, to which she had always wanted to return after the first time he took her there. In the fog of his new illusion, he did not realize that women can become adults in three days, and that three years had gone by since he had met her boat from Puerto Padre. No
matter how he tried to soften the blow, it was a brutal change for her, and she could not imagine the reason for it. On the day in the ice cream parlor when he told her he was going to marry, when he revealed the truth to her, she had reeled with panic, but then the possibility seemed so absurd that she forgot about it. In a very short while, however, she realized that he was behaving with inexplicable
evasiveness, as if it was true, as if he were not sixty years older than she, but sixty years younger.

One Saturday afternoon, Florentino Ariza found her trying to type in his bedroom, and she was doing rather well, for she was studying typing at school. She had completed more than half a page of automatic writing, but it was not difficult to isolate an occasional phrase that revealed her state
of mind. Florentino Ariza leaned over her shoulder to read what she had written. She was disturbed by his man’s heat, by his ragged breathing, by the scent on his clothes, which was the same as the scent on his pillow. She was no longer the little girl, the newcomer, whom he had undressed, one article of clothing at a time, with little baby games: first these little shoes for the little baby bear,
then this little chemise for the little puppy dog, next these little flowered panties for the little bunny rabbit, and a little kiss on her papa’s delicious little dickey-bird. No: now she was a full-fledged woman, who liked to take the initiative. She continued typing with
just one finger of her right hand, and with her left she felt for his leg, explored him, found him, felt him come to life,
grow, heard him sigh with excitement, and his old man’s breathing became uneven and labored. She knew him: from that point on he was going to lose control, his speech would become disjointed, he would be at her mercy, and he would not find his way back until he had reached the end. She led him by the hand to the bed as if he were a blind beggar on the street, and she cut him into pieces with malicious
tenderness; she added salt to taste, pepper, a clove of garlic, chopped onion, lemon juice, bay leaf, until he was seasoned and on the platter, and the oven was heated to the right temperature. There was no one in the house. The servant girls had gone out, and the masons and carpenters who were renovating the house did not work on Saturdays: they had the whole world to themselves. But on the
edge of the abyss he came out of his ecstasy, moved her hand away, sat up, and said in a tremulous voice:

“Be careful, we have no rubbers.”

She lay on her back in bed for a long time, thinking, and when she returned to school an hour early she was beyond all desire to cry, and she had sharpened her sense of smell along with her claws so that she could track down the miserable whore who had ruined
her life. Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, made another masculine misjudgment: he believed that she had been convinced of the futility of her desires and had resolved to forget him.

He was back in his element. At the end of six months he had heard nothing at all, and he found himself tossing and turning in bed until dawn, lost in the wasteland of a new kind of insomnia. He thought that Fermina
Daza had opened the first letter because of its appearance, had seen the initial she knew from the letters of long ago, and had thrown it out to be burned with the rest of the trash without even taking the trouble to tear it up. Just seeing the envelopes of those that followed would be enough for her to do the same thing without even opening them, and to continue to do so until the end of time,
while he came at last to his final written meditation. He did not believe that the woman existed who could resist her curiosity about half a year of almost daily letters when she did not even know the color of ink they were written in, but if such a woman existed, it had to be her.

Florentino
Ariza felt that his old age was not a rushing torrent but a bottomless cistern where his memory drained
away. His ingenuity was wearing thin. After patrolling the villa in La Manga for several days, he realized that this strategy from his youth would never break down the doors sealed by mourning. One morning, as he was looking for a number in the telephone directory, he happened to come across hers. He called. It rang many times, and at last he recognized her grave, husky voice: “Hello?” He hung
up without speaking, but the infinite distance of that unapproachable voice weakened his morale.

It was at this time that Leona Cassiani celebrated her birthday and invited a small group of friends to her house. He was distracted and spilled chicken gravy on himself. She cleaned his lapel with the corner of his napkin dampened in a glass of water, and then she tied it around his neck like a bib
to avoid a more serious accident: he looked like an old baby. She noticed that several times during dinner he took off his eyeglasses and dried them with his handkerchief because his eyes were watering. During coffee he fell asleep holding his cup in his hand, and she tried to take it away without waking him, but his embarrassed response was: “I was just resting my eyes.” Leona Cassiani went to
bed astounded at how his age was beginning to show.

On the first anniversary of the death of Juvenal Urbino, the family sent out invitations to a memorial Mass at the Cathedral. Florentino Ariza had still received no reply, and this was the driving force behind his bold decision to attend the Mass although he had not been invited. It was a social event more ostentatious than emotional. The first
few rows of pews were reserved for their lifetime owners, whose names were engraved on copper nameplates on the backs of their seats. Florentino Ariza was among the first to arrive so that he might sit where Fermina Daza could not pass by without seeing him. He thought that the best seats would be in the central nave, behind the reserved pews, but there were so many people he could not find a
seat there either, and he had to sit in the nave for poor relations. From there he saw Fermina Daza walk in on her son’s arm, dressed in an unadorned long-sleeved black velvet dress buttoned all the way from her neck to the tips of her shoes, like a bishop’s cassock, and a narrow scarf of Castilian lace instead of the veiled hat worn by other widows, and even by many other ladies who longed for that
condition. Her uncovered face shone like alabaster, her lanceolate eyes had a life of
their own under the enormous chandeliers of the central nave, and as she walked she was so erect, so haughty, so self-possessed, that she seemed no older than her son. As he stood, Florentino Ariza leaned the tips of his fingers against the back of the pew until his dizziness passed, for he felt that he and she
were not separated by seven paces, but existed in two different times.