AT THE AGE of twenty-eight, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been the most desirable of bachelors. Hehad returned from a long stay in Paris, where he had completed advanced studies in medicine andsurgery, and from the time he set foot on solid ground he gave overwhelming indications that hehad not wasted a minute of his time. He returned more fastidious than when he left, more incontrol of his nature, and none of his contemporaries seemed as rigorous and as learned as he inhis science, and none could dance better to the music of the day or improvise as well on the piano.
Seduced by his personal charms and by the certainty of his family fortune, the girls in his circleheld secret lotteries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled, too, on beingwith them, but he managed to keep himself in a state of grace, intact and tempting, until hesuccumbed without resistance to the plebeian charms of Fermina Daza.
He liked to say that this love was the result of a clinical error. He himself could not believethat it had happened, least of all at that time in his life when all his reserves of passion wereconcentrated on the destiny of his city which, he said with great frequency and no secondthoughts, had no equal in the world. In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart througha late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons,with the woody odour of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable loverskissing on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he wasnot prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still tooyoung to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanksto this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of theship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on theroofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand towhat extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.
The ship made its way across the bay through a floating blanket of drowned animals, andmost of the passengers took refuge in their cabins to escape the stench. The young doctor walkeddown the gangplank dressed in perfect alpaca, wearing a vest and dustcoat, with the beard of ayoung Pasteur and his hair divided by a neat, pale part, and with enough self-control to hide thelump in his throat caused not by terror but by sadness. On the nearly deserted dock guarded bybarefoot soldiers without uniforms, his sisters and mother were waiting for him, along with hisclosest friends, whom he found insipid and without expectations despite their sophisticated airs;they spoke about the crisis of the civil war as if it were remote and foreign, but they all had anevasive tremor in their voices and an uncertainty in their eyes that belied their words. His mothermoved him most of all. She was still young, a woman who had made a mark on life with herelegance and social drive, but who was now slowly withering in the aroma of camphor that rosefrom her widow's crepe. She must have seen herself in her son's confusion, and she asked inimmediate self-defence why his skin was as pale as wax.
"It's life over there, Mother," he said. "You turn green in Paris."A short while later, suffocating with the heat as he sat next to her in the closed carriage, hecould no longer endure the unmerciful reality that came pouring in through the window. The oceanlooked like ashes, the old palaces of the marquises were about to succumb to a proliferation ofbeggars, and it was impossible to discern the ardent scent of jasmine behind the vapours of deathfrom the open sewers. Everything seemed smaller to him than when he left, poorer and sadder, andthere were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps of the streets that the carriage horsesstumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house, located in the heart of the Districtof the Viceroys, he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia. Defeated, he turned hishead away so that his mother would not see, and he began to cry in silence.
The former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, historic residence of the Urbino de la Callefamily, had not escaped the surrounding wreckage. Dr. Juvenal Urbino discovered this with abroken heart when he entered the house through the gloomy portico and saw the dusty fountain inthe interior garden and the wild brambles in flower beds where iguanas wandered, and he realisedthat many marble flagstones were missing and others were broken on the huge stairway with itscopper railings that led to the principal rooms. His father, a physician who was more self-sacrificing than eminent, had died in the epidemic of Asian cholera that had devastated thepopulation six years earlier, and with him had died the spirit of the house. Do帽 a Blanca, hismother, smothered by mourning that was considered eternal, had substituted evening novenas forher dead husband's celebrated lyrical soir閑 s and chamber concerts. His two sisters, despite theirnatural inclinations and festive vocation, were fodder for the convent.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not sleep at all on the night of his return; he was frightened by thedarkness and the silence, and he said three rosaries to the Holy Spirit and all the prayers he couldremember to ward off calamities and shipwrecks and all manner of night terrors, while a curlewthat had come in through a half-closed door sang every hour on the hour in his bedroom. He wastormented by the hallucinating screams of the madwomen in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum nextdoor, the harsh dripping from the water jar into the washbasin which resonated throughout thehouse, the long-legged steps of the curlew wandering in his bedroom, his congenital fear of thedark, and the invisible presence of his dead father in the vast, sleeping mansion. When the curlewsang five o'clock along with the local roosters, Dr. Juvenal Urbino commended himself body andsoul to Divine Providence because he did not have the heart to live another day in his rubble-strewn homeland. But in time the affection of his family, the Sundays in the country, and thecovetous attentions of the unmarried women of his class mitigated the bitterness of his firstimpression. Little by little he grew accustomed to the sultry heat of October, to the excessiveodours, to the hasty judgments of his friends, to the We'll see tomorrow, Doctor, don't worry, andat last he gave in to the spell of habit. It did not take him long to invent an easy justification for hissurrender. This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had providedfor him, and he was responsible to it.
The first thing he did was to take possession of his father's office. He kept in place the hard,sombre English furniture made of wood that sighed in the icy cold of dawn, but he consigned tothe attic the treatises on viceregal science and romantic medicine and filled the bookshelvesbehind their glass doors with the writings of the new French school. He took down the fadedpictures, except for the one of the physician arguing with Death for the nude body of a femalepatient, and the Hippocratic Oath printed in Gothic letters, and he hung in their place, next to hisfather's only diploma, the many diverse ones he himself had received with highest honours fromvarious schools in Europe.
He tried to impose the latest ideas at Misericordia Hospital, but this was not as easy as it hadseemed in his youthful enthusiasm, for the antiquated house of health was stubborn in itsattachment to atavistic superstitions, such as standing beds in pots of water to prevent disease fromclimbing up the legs, or requiring evening wear and chamois gloves in the operating room becauseit was taken for granted that elegance was an essential condition for asepsis. They could nottolerate the young newcomer's tasting a patient's urine to determine the presence of sugar, quotingCharcot and Trousseau as if they were his roommates, issuing severe warnings in class against themortal risks of vaccines while maintaining a suspicious faith in the recent invention ofsuppositories. He was in conflict with everything: his renovating spirit, his maniacal sense of civicduty, his slow humour in a land of immortal pranksters--everything, in fact, that constituted hismost estimable virtues provoked the resentment of his older colleagues and the sly jokes of theyounger ones.
His obsession was the dangerous lack of sanitation in the city. He appealed to the highestauthorities to fill in the Spanish sewers that were an immense breeding ground for rats, and tobuild in their place a closed sewage system whose contents would not empty into the cove at themarket, as had always been the case, but into some distant drainage area instead. The well-equipped colonial houses had latrines with septic tanks, but two thirds of the population lived inshanties at the edge of the swamps and relieved themselves in the open air. The excrement dried inthe sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas in the cool,gentle breezes of December. Dr. Juvenal Urbino attempted to force the City Council to impose anobligatory training course so that the poor could learn how to build their own latrines. He foughtin vain to stop them from tossing garbage into the mangrove thickets that over the centuries hadbecome swamps of putrefaction, and to have them collect it instead at least twice a week andincinerate it in some uninhabited area.
He was aware of the mortal threat of the drinking water. The mere idea of building anaqueduct seemed fantastic, since those who might have supported it had underground cisterns attheir disposal, where water rained down over the years was collected under a thick layer of scum.
Among the most valued household articles of the time were carved wooden water collectorswhose stone filters dripped day and night into large earthen water jars. To prevent anyone fromdrinking from the aluminium cup used to dip out the water, its edges were as jagged as the crownof a mock king. The water was crystalline and cool in the dark clay, and it tasted of the forest. ButDr. Juvenal Urbino was not taken in by these appearances of purity, for he knew that despite allprecautions, the bottom of each earthen jar was a sanctuary for waterworms. He had spent theslow hours of his childhood watching them with an almost mystical astonishment, convincedalong with so many other people at the time that waterworms were animes, supernatural creatureswho, from the sediment in still water, courted young maidens and could inflict furious vengeancebecause of love. As a boy he had seen the havoc they had wreaked in the house of L醶ara Conde,a schoolteacher who dared to rebuff the animes, and he had seen the watery trail of glass in thestreet and the mountain of stones they had thrown at her windows for three days and three nights.
And so it was a long while before he learned that waterworms were in reality the larvae ofmosquitoes, but once he learned it he never forgot it, because from that moment on he realised thatthey and many other evil animes could pass through our simple stone filters intact.
For a long time the water in the cisterns had been honoured as the cause of the scrotal herniathat so many men in the city endured not only without embarrassment but with a certain patrioticinsolence. When Juvenal Urbino was in elementary school, he could not avoid a spasm of horrorat the sight of men with ruptures sitting in their doorways on hot afternoons, fanning theirenormous testicle as if it were a child sleeping between their legs. It was said that the herniawhistled like a lugubrious bird on stormy nights and twisted in unbearable pain when a buzzardfeather was burned nearby, but no one complained about those discomforts because a large, well-carried rupture was, more than anything else, a display of masculine honour. When Dr. JuvenalUrbino returned from Europe he was already well aware of the scientific fallacy in these beliefs,but they were so rooted in local superstition that many people opposed the mineral enrichment ofthe water in the cisterns for fear of destroying its ability to cause an honourable rupture.
Impure water was not all that alarmed Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He was just as concerned with thelack of hygiene at the public market, a vast extension of cleared land along Las羘imas Bay wherethe sailing ships from the Antilles would dock. An illustrious traveller of the period described themarket as one of the most varied in the world. It was rich, in fact, and profuse and noisy, but also,perhaps, the most alarming of markets. Set on its own garbage heap, at the mercy of capricioustides, it was the spot where the bay belched filth from the sewers back onto land. The offal fromthe adjoining slaughterhouse was also thrown away there--severed heads, rotting viscera, animalrefuse that floated, in sunshine and starshine, in a swamp of blood. The buzzards fought for it withthe rats and the dogs in a perpetual scramble among the deer and succulent capons from Sotaventohanging from the eaves of the market stalls, and the spring vegetables from Arjona displayed onstraw mats spread over the ground. Dr. Urbino wanted to make the place sanitary, he wanted aslaughterhouse built somewhere else and a covered market constructed with stained-glass turrets,like the one he had seen in the old boquer韆 s in Barcelona, where the provisions looked sosplendid and clean that it seemed a shame to eat them. But even the most complaisant of hisnotable friends pitied his illusory passion. That is how they were: they spent their livesproclaiming their proud origins, the historic merits of the city, the value of its relics, its heroism,its beauty, but they were blind to the decay of the years. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, on the other hand,loved it enough to see it with the eyes of truth.
"How noble this city must be," he would say, "for we have spent four hundred years trying tofinish it off and we still have not succeeded,"They almost had, however. The epidemic of cholera morbus, whose first victims were struckdown in the standing water of the market, had, in eleven weeks, been responsible for the greatestdeath toll in our history. Until that time the eminent dead were interred under the flagstones in thechurches, in the exclusive vicinity of archbishops and capitulars, while the less wealthy wereburied in the patios of convents. The poor were sent to the colonial cemetery, located on a windyhill that was separated from the city by a dry canal whose mortar bridge bore the legend carvedthere by order of some clairvoyant mayor: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate. After the first twoweeks of the cholera epidemic, the cemetery was overflowing and there was no room left in thechurches despite the fact that they had dispatched the decayed remains of many nameless civicheroes to the communal ossuary. The air in the Cathedral grew thin with the vapours from badlysealed crypts, and its doors did not open again until three years later, at the time that Fermina Dazasaw Florentino Ariza at close quarters as she left Midnight Mass. By the third week the cloister ofthe Convent of St. Clare was full all the way to its poplar-lined walks, and it was necessary to usethe Community's orchard, which was twice as large, as a cemetery. There graves were dug deepenough to bury the dead on three levels, without delay and without coffins, but this had to bestopped because the brimming ground turned into a sponge that oozed sickening, infected blood atevery step. Then arrangements were made to continue burying in The Hand of God, a cattle ranchless than a league from the city, which was later consecrated as the Universal Cemetery.
From the time the cholera proclamation was issued, the local garrison shot a cannon from thefortress every quarter hour, day and night, in accordance with the local superstition thatgunpowder purified the atmosphere. The cholera was much more devastating to the blackpopulation, which was larger and poorer, but in reality it had no regard for colour or background.
It ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the extent of its ravages was never known, not becausethis was impossible to establish but because one of our most widespread virtues was a certainreticence concerning personal misfortune.
Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino, the father of Juvenal, was a civic hero during that dreadful time,as well as its most distinguished victim. By official decree he personally designed and directedpublic health measures, but on his own initiative he intervened to such an extent in every socialquestion that during the most critical moments of the plague no higher authority seemed to exist.
Years later, reviewing the chronicle of those days, Dr. Juvenal Urbino confirmed that his father'smethodology had been more charitable than scientific and, in many ways, contrary to reason, sothat in large measure it had fostered the voraciousness of the plague. He confirmed this with thecompassion of sons whom life has turned, little by little, into the fathers of their fathers, and forthe first time he regretted not having stood with his father in the solitude of his errors. But he didnot dispute his merits: his diligence and his self-sacrifice and above all his personal couragedeserved the many honours rendered him when the city recovered from the disaster, and it waswith justice that his name was found among those of so many other heroes of less honourablewars.
He did not live to see his own glory. When he recognised in himself the irreversiblesymptoms that he had seen and pitied in others, he did not even attempt a useless struggle butwithdrew from the world so as not to infect anyone else. Locked in a utility room at MisericordiaHospital, deaf to the calls of his colleagues and the pleas of his family, removed from the horror ofthe plague victims dying on the floor in the packed corridors, he wrote a letter of feverish love tohis wife and children, a letter of gratitude for his existence in which he revealed how much andwith how much fervour he had loved life. It was a farewell of twenty heartrending pages in whichthe progress of the disease could be observed in the deteriorating script, and it was not necessaryto know the writer to realise that he had signed his name with his last breath. In accordance withhis instructions, his ashen body was mingled with others in the communal cemetery and was notseen by anyone who loved him.
Three days later, in Paris, Dr. Juvenal Urbino received a telegram during supper with friends,and he toasted the memory of his father with champagne. He said: "He was a good man." Later hewould reproach himself for his lack of maturity: he had avoided reality in order not to cry. Butthree weeks later he received a copy of the posthumous letter, and then he surrendered to the truth.
All at once the image of the man he had known before he knew any other was revealed to him inall its profundity, the man who had raised him and taught him and had slept and fornicated withhis mother for thirty-two years and yet who, before that letter, had never revealed himself bodyand soul because of timidity, pure and simple. Until then Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family hadconceived of death as a misfortune that befell others, other people's fathers and mothers, otherpeople's brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs. They were people whose liveswere slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappearedlittle by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they wereabsorbed into oblivion. His father's posthumous letter, more than the telegram with the bad news,hurled him headlong against the certainty of death. And yet one of his oldest memories, when hewas nine years old perhaps, perhaps when he was eleven, was in a way an early sign of death inthe person of his father. One rainy afternoon the two of them were in the office his father kept inthe house; he was drawing larks and sunflowers with coloured chalk on the tiled floor, and hisfather was reading by the light shining through the window, his vest unbuttoned and elasticarmbands on his shirt sleeves. Suddenly he stopped reading to scratch his back with a long-handled back scratcher that had a little silver hand on the end. Since he could not reach the spotthat itched, he asked his son to scratch him with his nails, and as the boy did so he had the strangesensation of not feeling his own body. At last his father looked at him over his shoulder with a sadsmile.
"If I died now," he said, "you would hardly remember me when you are my age."He said it for no apparent reason, and the angel of death hovered for a moment in the coolshadows of the office and flew out again through the window, leaving a trail of feathers flutteringin his wake, but the boy did not see them. More than twenty years had gone by since then, andJuvenal Urbino would very soon be as old as his father was that afternoon. He knew he wasidentical to him, and to that awareness had now been added the awful consciousness that he wasalso as mortal.
Cholera became an obsession for him. He did not know much more about it than he hadlearned in a routine manner in some marginal course, when he had found it difficult to believe thatonly thirty years before, it had been responsible for more than one hundred forty thousand deathsin France, including Paris. But after the death of his father he learned all there was to know aboutthe different forms of cholera, almost as a penance to appease his memory, and he studied with themost outstanding epidemiologist of his time and the creator of the cordons sanitaires, ProfessorAdrien Proust, father of the great novelist. So that when he returned to his country and smelled thestench of the market while he was still out at sea and saw the rats in the sewers and the childrenrolling naked in the puddles on the streets, he not only understood how the tragedy had occurredbut was certain that it would be repeated at any moment.
The moment was not long in coming. In less than a year his students at Misericordia Hospitalasked for his help in treating a charity patient with a strange blue coloration all over his body. Dr.
Juvenal Urbino had only to see him from the doorway to recognise the enemy. But they were inluck: the patient had arrived three days earlier on a schooner from Cura莽ao and had come to thehospital clinic by himself, and it did not seem probable that he had infected anyone else. In anyevent, Dr. Juvenal Urbino alerted his colleagues and had the authorities warn the neighbouringports so that they could locate and quarantine the contaminated schooner, and he had to restrainthe military commander of the city who wanted to declare martial law and initiate the therapeuticstrategy of firing the cannon every quarter hour.
"Save that powder for when the Liberals come," he said with good humour. "We are nolonger in the Middle Ages."The patient died in four days, choked by a grainy white vomit, but in the following weeks noother case was discovered despite constant vigilance. A short while later, The Commercial Dailypublished the news that two children had died of cholera in different locations in the city. It waslearned that one of them had had common dysentery, but the other, a girl of five, appeared to havebeen, in fact, a victim of cholera. Her parents and three brothers were separated and placed underindividual quarantine, and the entire neighbourhood was subjected to strict medical supervision.
One of the children contracted cholera but recovered very soon, and the entire family returnedhome when the danger was over. Eleven more cases were reported in the next three months, and inthe fifth there was an alarming outbreak, but by the end of the year it was believed that the dangerof an epidemic had been averted. No one doubted that the sanitary rigour of Dr. Juvenal Urbino,more than the efficacy of his pronouncements, had made the miracle possible. From that time on,and well into this century, cholera was endemic not only in the city but along most of theCaribbean coast and the valley of the Magdalena, but it never again flared into an epidemic. Thecrisis meant that Dr. Juvenal Urbino's warnings were heard with greater seriousness by publicofficials. They established an obligatory Chair of Cholera and Yellow Fever in the MedicalSchool, and realised the urgency of closing up the sewers and building a market far from thegarbage dump. By that time, however, Dr. Urbino was not concerned with proclaiming victory, norwas he moved to persevere in his social mission, for at that moment one of his wings was broken,he was distracted and in disarray and ready to forget everything else in life, because he had beenstruck by the lightning of his love for Fermina Daza.
It was, in fact, the result of a clinical error. A physician who was a friend of his thought hedetected the warning symptoms of cholera in an eighteen-year-old patient, and he asked Dr.
Juvenal Urbino to see her. He called that very afternoon, alarmed at the possibility that the plaguehad entered the sanctuary of the old city, for all the cases until that time had occurred in the poorneighbourhoods, and almost all of those among the black population. He encountered other, lessunpleasant, surprises. From the outside, the house, shaded by the almond trees in the Park of theEvangels, appeared to be in ruins, as did the others in the colonial district, but inside there was aharmony of beauty and an astonishing light that seemed to come from another age. The entranceopened directly into a square Sevillian patio that was white with a recent coat of lime and hadflowering orange trees and the same tiles on the floor as on the walls. There was an invisiblesound of running water, and pots with carnations on the cornices, and cages of strange birds in thearcades. The strangest of all were three crows in a very large cage, who filled the patio with anambiguous perfume every time they flapped their wings. Several dogs, chained elsewhere in thehouse, began to bark, maddened by the scent of a stranger, but a woman's shout stopped themdead, and numerous cats leapt all around the patio and hid among the flowers, frightened by theauthority in the voice. Then there was such a diaphanous silence that despite the disorder of thebirds and the syllables of water on stone, one could hear the desolate breath of the sea.
Shaken by the conviction that God was present, Dr. Juvenal Urbino thought that such a housewas immune to the plague. He followed Gala Placidia along the arcaded corridor, passed by thewindow of the sewing room where Florentino Ariza had seen Fermina Daza for the first time,when the patio was still a shambles, climbed the new marble stairs to the second floor, and waitedto be announced before going into the patient's bedroom. But Gala Placidia came out again with amessage: "The se帽orita says you cannot come in now because her papa is not at home."And so he returned at five in the afternoon, in accordance with the maid's instructions, andLorenzo Daza himself opened the street door and led him to his daughter's bedroom. There heremained, sitting in a dark corner with his arms folded, and making futile efforts to control hisragged breathing during the examination. It was not easy to know who was more constrained, thedoctor with his chaste touch or the patient in the silk chemise with her virgin's modesty, butneither one looked the other in the eye; instead, he asked questions in an impersonal voice and sheresponded in a tremulous voice, both of them very conscious of the man sitting in the shadows. Atlast Dr. Juvenal Urbino asked the patient to sit up, and with exquisite care he opened hernightdress down to the waist; her pure high breasts with the childish nipples shone for an instant inthe darkness of the bedroom, like a flash of gunpowder, before she hurried to cover them withcrossed arms. Imperturbable, the physician opened her arms without looking at her and examinedher by direct auscultation, his ear against her skin, first the chest and then the back.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say that he experienced no emotion when he met the woman withwhom he would live until the day of his death. He remembered the sky-blue chemise edged inlace, the feverish eyes, the long hair hanging loose over her shoulders, but he was so concernedwith the outbreak of cholera in the colonial district that he took no notice of her floweringadolescence: he had eyes only for the slightest hint that she might be a victim of the plague. Shewas more explicit: the young doctor she had heard so much about in connection with the choleraepidemic seemed a pedant incapable of loving anyone but himself. The diagnosis was an intestinalinfection of alimentary origin, which was cured by three days of treatment at home. Relieved bythis proof that his daughter had not contracted cholera, Lorenzo Daza accompanied Dr. JuvenalUrbino to the door of his carriage, paid him a gold peso for the visit, a fee that seemed excessiveeven for a physician to the rich, and he said goodbye with immoderate expressions of gratitude.
He was overwhelmed by the splendour of the Doctor's family names, and he not only did not hideit but would have done anything to see him again, under less formal circumstances.
The case should have been considered closed. But on Tuesday of the following week, withoutbeing called and with no prior announcement, Dr. Juvenal Urbino returned to the house at theinconvenient hour of three in the afternoon. Fermina Daza was in the sewing room, having alesson in oil painting with two of her friends, when he appeared at the window in his spotlesswhite frock coat and his white top hat and signalled to her to come over to him. She put her palettedown on a chair and tiptoed to the window, her ruffled skirt raised to keep it from dragging on thefloor. She wore a diadem with a jewel that hung on her forehead, and the luminous stone was thesame aloof colour as her eyes, and everything in her breathed an aura of coolness. The Doctor wasstruck by the fact that she was dressed for painting at home as if she were going to a party. Hetook her pulse through the open window, he had her stick out her tongue, he examined her throatwith an aluminium tongue depressor, he looked inside her lower eyelids, and each time he noddedin approval. He was less inhibited than on the previous visit, but she was more so, because shecould not understand the reason for the unexpected examination if he himself had said that hewould not come back unless they called him because of some change. And even more important:
she did not ever want to see him again. When he finished his examination, the Doctor put thetongue depressor back into his bag, crowded with instruments and bottles of medicine, and closedit with a resounding snap.
"You are like a new-sprung rose," he said.
"Thank you.""Thank God," he said, and he misquoted St. Thomas: "Remember that everything that isgood, 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 thatmoment she interpreted it as a joke. Besides, her two friends, who had pretended to paint whileshe and Dr. Juvenal Urbino were talking at the window, tittered and hid their faces behind theirpalettes, and this made Fermina Daza lose her self-control. Blind with fury, she slammed thewindow shut. The Doctor stared at the sheer lace curtains in bewilderment, he tried to find thestreet door but lost his way, and in his confusion he knocked into the cage with the perfumedcrows. They broke into sordid shrieking, flapped their wings in fright, and saturated the Doctor'sclothing 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 stairsbuttoning his shirt, his side-whiskers still in an uproar after a restless siesta. The Doctor tried toovercome 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 windowand 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. Heinsisted: "Hurry up." She looked at her friends with a secret plea for understanding, and she said toher father that she had nothing to beg pardon for, she had only closed the window to keep out thesun. Dr. Urbino, with good humour, tried to confirm her words, but Lorenzo Daza insisted that hebe obeyed. Then Fermina Daza, pale with rage, turned toward the window, and extending her rightfoot 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 humour, making a cavalier's flourish with his tophat, but he did not win the compassionate smile he had hoped for. Then Lorenzo Daza invited himto have a cup of coffee in his office to set things right, and he accepted with pleasure so that therewould be no doubt whatsoever that he did not harbour 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 themorning. He did not drink alcohol either, except for a glass of wine with meals on solemnoccasions, but he not only drank down the coffee that Lorenzo Daza offered him, he also accepteda glass of anisette. Then he accepted another coffee with another anisette, and then another andanother, even though he still had to make a few more calls. At first he listened with attention to theexcuses that Lorenzo Daza continued to offer in the name of his daughter, whom he defined as anintelligent 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 Doctorthought he heard Fermina Daza's voice at the other end of the patio, and his imagination went afterher, followed her through the night that had just descended in the house as she lit the lights in thecorridor, fumigated the bedrooms with the insecticide bomb, uncovered the pot of soup on thestove, 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 forcedto give in and ask her to forgive his severity that afternoon.
Dr. Urbino knew enough about women to realise that Fermina Daza would not pass by theoffice until he left, but he stayed nevertheless because he felt that wounded pride would give himno 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 indomitableeloquence. 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 theswivel chair, whose springs wailed like an animal in heat. He had drunk three glasses of anisette toeach one drunk by his guest, and he paused only when he realised that they could no longer seeeach 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 themovement 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 tohim but to someone who was still in the chair where he had been sitting, and he had to make agreat effort not to lose his mind.
It was after seven o'clock when he left the office, preceded by Lorenzo Daza. There was a fullmoon. The patio, idealised by anisette, floated at the bottom of an aquarium, and the cagescovered with cloths looked like ghosts sleeping under the hot scent of new orange blossoms. Thesewing room window was open, there was a lighted lamp on the worktable, and the unfinishedpaintings 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 herfather so that she could make him pay for the afternoon's humiliation. The Doctor did notrenounce his hope of saying goodbye to her, but Lorenzo Daza did not suggest it. He yearned forthe innocence of her pulse, her cat's tongue, her tender tonsils, but he was disheartened by the ideathat she never wanted to see him again and would never permit him to try to see her. WhenLorenzo Daza walked into the entryway, the crows, awake under their sheets, emitted a funerealshriek. "They will peck out your eyes," the Doctor said aloud, thinking of her, and Lorenzo Dazaturned 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 forthe second visit, but he would not take it. He gave the correct instructions to the driver for takinghim to the houses of the two patients he still had to see, and he climbed into the carriage withouthelp. But he began to feel sick as they bounced along the cobbled streets, so that he ordered thedriver to take a different route. He looked at himself for a moment in the carriage mirror and sawthat his image, too, was still thinking about Fermina Daza. He shrugged his shoulders. Then hebelched, lowered his head to his chest, and fell asleep, and in his dream he began to hear funeralbells. First he heard those of the Cathedral and then he heard those of all the other churches, oneafter 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 havingcaf?con leche and crullers for supper at the formal table in the large dining room when they sawhim appear in the door, his face haggard and his entire being dishonoured by the whorish perfumeof the crows. The largest bell of the adjacent Cathedral resounded in the immense empty space ofthe house. His mother asked him in alarm where in the world he had been, for they had lookedeverywhere for him so that he could attend General Ignacio Mar韆, the last grandson of theMarquis de Jara韟 de la Vera, who had been struck down that afternoon by a cerebralhaemorrhage: it was for him that the bells were tolling. Dr. Juvenal Urbino listened to his motherwithout hearing her as he clutched the doorframe, and then he gave a half turn, trying to reach hisbedroom, 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 youto show up in your own house in this state."The strangest thing, however, had not yet occurred. Taking advantage of the visit of thefamous pianist Romeo Lussich, who played a cycle of Mozart sonatas as soon as the city hadrecovered from mourning the death of General Ignacio Mar韆, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had the pianofrom the Music School placed in a mule-drawn wagon and brought a history-making serenade toFermina Daza. She was awakened by the first measures, and she did not have to look out thegrating on the balcony to know who was the sponsor of that uncommon tribute. The only thing sheregretted was not having the courage of other harassed maidens, who emptied their chamber potson the heads of unwanted suitors. Lorenzo Daza, on the other hand, dressed without delay as theserenade was playing, and when it was over he had Dr. Juvenal Urbino and the pianist, stillwearing their formal concert clothes, come in to the visitors' parlour, where he thanked them forthe serenade with a glass of good brandy.
Fermina Daza soon realised that her father was trying to soften her heart. The day after theserenade, he said to her in a casual manner: "Imagine how your mother would feel if she knew youwere being courted by an Urbino de la Calle." Her dry response was: "She would turn over in hergrave." The friends who painted with her told her that Lorenzo Daza had been invited to lunch atthe Social Club by Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who had received a severe reprimand for breaking clubrules. It was only then that she learned that her father had applied for membership in the SocialClub on several occasions, and that each time he had been rejected with such a large number ofblack balls that another attempt was not possible. But Lorenzo Daza had an infinite capacity forassimilating humiliations, and he continued his ingenious strategies for arranging casualencounters with Juvenal Urbino, not realising that it was Juvenal Urbino who went out of his wayto let himself be encountered. At times they spent hours chatting in the office, while the houseseemed suspended at the edge of time because Fermina Daza would not permit anything to run itsnormal course until he left. The Parish Caf?was a good intermediate haven. It was there thatLorenzo Daza gave Juvenal Urbino his first lessons in chess, and he was such a diligent pupil thatchess 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 andthe monogram "J. U. C." was imprinted on the seal. He slipped it under the door as he passedFermina's bedroom, and she never understood how it had come there, since it was inconceivable toher that her father had changed so much that he would bring her a letter from a suitor. She left iton 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 JuvenalUrbino had returned to the house to give her the tongue depressor he had used to examine herthroat. In the dream, the tongue depressor was made not of aluminium but of a delicious metal thatshe had tasted with pleasure in other dreams, so that she broke it in two unequal pieces and gavehim the smaller one.
When she awoke she opened the letter. It was brief and proper, and all that Juvenal Urbinoasked was permission to request her father's permission to visit her. She was impressed by itssimplicity and seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many daysfaded away on the spot. She kept the letter in the bottom of her trunk, but she remembered that shehad also kept Florentino Ariza's perfumed letters there, and she took it out of the chest to findanother place for it, shaken by a rush of shame. Then it seemed that the most decent thing to dowas to pretend she had not received it, and she burned it in the lamp, watching how the drops ofwax exploded into blue bubbles above the flame. She sighed: "Poor man." And then she realisedthat it was the second time she had said those words in little more than a year, and for a momentshe thought about Florentino Ariza, and even she was surprised at how removed he was from herlife: poor man.
Three more letters arrived with the last rains in October, the first of them accompanied by alittle 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 tellhim they had not been received. Moreover, both of them were sealed with his monogram in waxand written in the cryptic scrawl that Fermina Daza already recognised as a physician'shandwriting. Both of them said in substance what had been said in the first, and were conceived inthe same submissive spirit, but underneath their propriety one could begin to detect an impatiencethat was never evident in the parsimonious letters of Florentino Ariza. Fermina Daza read them assoon as they were delivered, two weeks apart, and without knowing why, she changed her mind asshe 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 waydifferent from the previous ones. The handwriting was so childish that there was no doubt it hadbeen scrawled with the left hand, but Fermina Daza did not realise that until the text itself provedto be a poison pen letter. Whoever had written it took for granted that Fermina Daza hadbewitched Dr. Juvenal Urbino with her love potions, and from that supposition sinisterconclusions had been drawn. It ended with a threat: if Fermina Daza did not renounce her effortsto move up in the world by means of the most desirable man in the city, she would be exposed topublic disgrace.
She felt herself the victim of a grave injustice, but her reaction was not vindictive. On thecontrary: she would have liked to discover who the author of the anonymous letter was in order toconvince him of his error with all the pertinent explanations, for she felt certain that never, for anyreason, would she respond to the wooing of Juvenal Urbino. In the days that followed she receivedtwo more unsigned letters, as perfidious as the first, but none of the three seemed to be written bythe same person. Either she was the victim of a plot, or the false version of her secret love affairhad gone further than anyone could imagine. She was disturbed by the idea that it was all theresult of a simple indiscretion on the part of Juvenal Urbino. It occurred to her that perhaps he wasdifferent from his worthy appearance, that perhaps he talked too much when he was making housecalls and boasted of imaginary conquests, as did so many other men of his class. She thoughtabout writing him a letter to reproach him for the insult to her honour, but then she decided againstthe idea because that might be just what he wanted. She tried to learn more from the friends whopainted with her in the sewing room, but they had heard only benign comments concerning theserenade by solo piano. She felt furious, impotent, humiliated. In contrast to her initial feeling thatshe wanted to meet with her invisible enemy in order to convince him of his errors, now she onlywanted to cut him to ribbons with the pruning shears. She spent sleepless nights analysing detailsand phrases in the anonymous letters in the hope of finding some shred of comfort. It was a vainhope: Fermina Daza was, by nature, alien to the inner world of the Urbino de la Calle family, andshe had weapons for defending herself from their good actions but not from their evil ones.
This conviction became even more bitter after the fear caused by the black doll that was sentto her without any letter, but whose origin seemed easy to imagine: only Dr. Juvenal Urbino couldhave sent it. It had been bought in Martinique, according to the original tag, and it was dressed inan exquisite gown, its hair rippled with gold threads, and it closed its eyes when it was laid down.
It seemed so charming to Fermina Daza that she overcame her scruples and laid it on her pillowduring the day and grew accustomed to sleeping with it at night. After a time, however, shediscovered when she awoke from an exhausting dream that the doll was growing: the originalexquisite dress she had arrived in was up above her thighs, and her shoes had burst from thepressure of her feet. Fermina Daza had heard of African spells, but none as frightening as this. Onthe other hand, she could not imagine that a man like Juvenal Urbino would be capable of such anatrocity. She was right: the doll had been brought not by his coachman but by an itinerantshrimpmonger whom no one knew. Trying to solve the enigma, Fermina Daza thought for amoment of Florentino Ariza, whose depressed condition caused her dismay, but life convinced herof her error. The mystery was never clarified, and just thinking about it made her shudder withfear long after she was married and had children and thought of herself as destiny's darling: thehappiest woman in the world.
Dr. Urbino's last resort was the mediation of Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of theAcademy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, who could not deny the request of a familythat had supported her Community since its establishment in the Americas. She appeared onemorning at nine o'clock in the company of a novice, and for half an hour the two of them had toamuse themselves with the birdcages while Fermina Daza finished her bath. She was a masculineGerman with a metallic accent and an imperious gaze that had no relationship to her puerilepassions. Fermina Daza hated her and everything that had to do with her more than anything inthis world, and the mere memory of her false piety made scorpions crawl in her belly. Just thesight of her from the bathroom door was enough to revive the torture of school, the unbearableboredom of daily Mass, the terror of examinations, the servile diligence of the novices, all of thatlife distorted by the prism of spiritual poverty. Sister Franca de la Luz, on the other hand, greetedher with a joy that seemed sincere. She was surprised at how much she had grown and matured,and she praised the good judgment with which she managed the house, the good taste evident inthe patio, the brazier filled with orange blossoms. She ordered the novice to wait for her withoutgetting too close to the crows, who in a careless moment might peck out her eyes, and she lookedfor a private spot where she could sit down and talk alone with Fermina, who invited her into thedrawing room.
It was a brief and bitter visit. Sister Franca de la Luz, wasting no time on formalities, offeredhonourable reinstatement to Fermina Daza. The reason for her expulsion would be erased not onlyfrom the records but also from the memory of the Community, and this would allow her to finishher studies and receive her baccalaureate degree. Fermina Daza was perplexed and wanted toknow why.
"It is the request of someone who deserves everything he desires and whose only wish is tomake you happy," said the nun. "Do you know who that is?"Then she understood. She asked herself with what authority a woman who had made her lifemiserable because of an innocent letter served as the emissary of love, but she did not dare tospeak of it. Instead she said yes, she knew that man, and by the same token she also knew that hehad no right to interfere in her life.
"All he asks is that you allow him to speak with you for five minutes," said the nun. "I amcertain your father will agree."Fermina Daza's anger grew more intense at the idea that her father was an accessory to thevisit.
"We saw each other twice when I was sick," she said. "Now there is no reason for us to seeeach other again.""For any woman with a shred of sense, that man is a gift from Divine Providence," said thenun.
She continued to speak of his virtues, of his devotion, of his dedication to serving those inpain. As she spoke she pulled from her sleeve a gold rosary with Christ carved in marble, anddangled it in front of Fermina Daza's eyes. It was a family heirloom, more than a hundred yearsold, carved by a goldsmith from Siena and blessed by Clement IV.
"It is yours," she said.
Fermina Daza felt the blood pounding through her veins, and then she dared.
"I do not understand how you can lend yourself to this," she said, "if you think that love is asin."Sister Franca de la Luz pretended not to notice the remark, but her eyelids flamed. Shecontinued to dangle the rosary in front of Fermina Daza's eyes.
"It would be better for you to come to an understanding with me," she said, "because after mecomes His Grace the Archbishop, and it is a different story with him.""Let him come," said Fermina Daza.
Sister Franca de la Luz tucked the gold rosary into her sleeve. Then from the other she took awell-used handkerchief squeezed into a ball and held it tight in her fist, looking at Fermina Dazafrom a great distance and with a smile of commiseration.
"My poor child," she sighed, "you are still thinking about that man."Fermina Daza chewed on the impertinence as she looked at the nun without blinking, lookedher straight in the eye without speaking, chewing in silence, until she saw with infinite satisfactionthat those masculine eyes had filled with tears. Sister Franca de la Luz dried them with the ball ofthe handkerchief and stood up.
"Your father is right when he says that you are a mule," she said.
The Archbishop did not come. So the siege might have ended that day if Hildebranda S醤chez had not arrived to spend Christmas with her cousin, and life changed for both of them. Theymet her on the schooner from Riohacha at five o'clock in the morning, surrounded by a crowd ofpassengers half dead from seasickness, but she walked off the boat radiant, very much a woman,and excited after the bad night at sea. She arrived with crates of live turkeys and all the fruits ofher fertile lands so that no one would lack for food during her visit. Lis韒 aco S醤 chez, herfather, sent a message asking if they needed musicians for their holiday parties, because he had thebest at his disposal, and he promised to send a load of fireworks later on. He also announced thathe could not come for his daughter before March, so there was plenty of time for them to enjoylife. The two cousins began at once. From the first afternoon they bathed together, naked, the twoof them making their reciprocal ablutions with water from the cistern. They soaped each other,they removed each other's nits, they compared their buttocks, their quiet breasts, each looking atherself in the other's mirror to judge with what cruelty time had treated them since the lastoccasion when they had seen each other undressed. Hildebranda was large and solid, with goldenskin, but all the hair on her body was like a mulatta's, as short and curly as steel wool. FerminaDaza, on the other hand, had a pale nakedness, with long lines, serene skin, and straight hair. GalaPlacidia had two identical beds placed in the bedroom, but at times they lay together in one andtalked in the dark until dawn. They smoked long, thin highwaymen's cigars that Hildebranda hadhidden in the lining of her trunk, and afterward they had to burn Armenian paper to purify the ranksmell they left behind in the bedroom. Fermina Daza had smoked for the first time in Valledupar,and had continued in Fonseca and Riohacha, where as many as ten cousins would lock themselvesin a room to talk about men and to smoke. She learned to smoke backward, with the lit end in hermouth, the way men smoked at night during the wars so that the glow of their cigarettes would notbetray them. But she had never smoked alone. With Hildebranda in her house, she smoked everynight before going to sleep, and it was then that she acquired the habit although she always hid it,even from her husband and her children, not only because it was thought improper for a woman tosmoke in public but because she associated the pleasure with secrecy.
Hildebranda's trip had also been imposed by her parents in an effort to put distance betweenher and her impossible love, although they wanted her to think that it was to help Fermina decideon a good match. Hildebranda had accepted, hoping to mock forgetfulness as her cousin had donebefore her, and she had arranged with the telegraph operator in Fonseca to send her messages withthe greatest prudence. And that is why her disillusion was so bitter when she learned that FerminaDaza had rejected Florentino Ariza. Moreover, Hildebranda had a universal conception of love,and she believed that whatever happened to one love affected all other loves throughout the world.
Still, she did not renounce her plan. With an audacity that caused a crisis of dismay in FerminaDaza, she went to the telegraph office alone, intending to win the favour of Florentino Ariza.
She would not have recognised him, for there was nothing about him that corresponded to theimage she had formed from Fermina Daza. At first glance it seemed impossible that her cousincould have been on the verge of madness because of that almost invisible clerk with his air of awhipped dog, whose clothing, worthy of a rabbi in disgrace, and whose solemn manner could notperturb anyone's heart. But she soon repented of her first impression, for Florentino Ariza placedhimself at her unconditional service without knowing who she was: he never found out. No onecould have understood her as he did, so that he did not ask for identification or even for heraddress. His solution was very simple: she would pass by the telegraph office on Wednesdayafternoons so that he could place her lover's answers in her hand, and nothing more. And yet whenhe read the written message that Hildebranda brought him, he asked if she would accept asuggestion, and she agreed. Florentino Ariza first made some corrections between the lines, erasedthem, rewrote them, had no more room, and at last tore up the page and wrote a completely newmessage that she thought very touching. When she left the telegraph office, Hildebranda was onthe verge of tears. "He is ugly and sad," she said to Fermina Daza, "but he is all love." What moststruck Hildebranda was her cousin's solitude. She seemed, she told her, an old maid of twenty.
Accustomed to large scattered families in houses where no one was certain how many people wereliving or eating at any given time, Hildebranda could not imagine a girl her age reduced to thecloister of a private life. That was true: from the time she awoke at six in the morning until sheturned out the light in the bedroom, Fermina Daza devoted herself to killing time. Life wasimposed on her from outside. First, at the final rooster crow, the milkman woke her with hisrapping on the door knocker. Then came the knock of the fishwife with her box of red snappersdying on a bed of algae, the sumptuous fruit sellers with vegetables from Mar韆 la Baja and fruitfrom San Jacinto. And then, for the rest of the day, everyone knocked at the door: beggars, girlswith lottery tickets, the Sisters of Charity, the knife grinder with the gossip, the man who boughtbottles, the man who bought old gold, the man who bought newspapers, the fake gipsies whooffered to read one's destiny in cards, in the lines of one's palm, in coffee grounds, in the water inwashbasins. Gala Placidia spent the week opening and closing the street door to say no, anotherday, or shouting from the balcony in a foul humour to stop bothering us, damn it, we alreadybought everything we need. She had replaced Aunt Escol醩 tica with so much fervour and somuch grace that Fermina confused them to the point of loving her. She had the obsessions of aslave. Whenever she had free time she would go to the workroom to iron the linens; she kept themperfect, she kept them in cupboards with lavender, and she ironed and folded not only what shehad just washed but also what might have lost its brightness through disuse. With the same careshe continued to maintain the wardrobe of Fermina S醤 chez, Fermina's mother, who had diedfourteen years before. But Fermina Daza was the one who made the decisions. She ordered whatthey would eat, what they would buy, what had to be done in every circumstance, and in that wayshe determined the life in a house where in reality nothing had to be determined. When shefinished washing the cages and feeding the birds, and making certain that the flowers wanted fornothing, she was at a loss. Often, after she was expelled from school, she would fall asleep atsiesta and not wake up until the next day. The painting classes were only a more amusing way tokill time.
Her relationship with her father had lacked affection since the expulsion of Aunt Escol醩tica, although they had found the way to live together without bothering each other. When sheawoke, he had already gone to his business. He rarely missed the ritual of lunch, although healmost never ate, for the aperitifs and Galician appetisers at the Parish Caf?satisfied him. He didnot eat supper either: they left his meal on the table, everything on one plate covered by another,although they knew that he would not eat it until the next day when it was reheated for hisbreakfast. Once a week he gave his daughter money for expenses, which he calculated with careand she administered with rigour, but he listened with pleasure to any request she might make forunforeseen expenses. He never questioned a penny she spent, he never asked her for anyexplanations, but she behaved as if she had to make an accounting before the Tribunal of the HolyOffice. He had never spoken to her about the nature or condition of his business, and he had nevertaken her to his offices in the port, which were in a location forbidden to decent young ladies evenif accompanied by their fathers. Lorenzo Daza did not come home before ten o'clock at night,which was the curfew hour during the less critical periods of the wars. Until that time he wouldstay at the Parish Caf? playing one game or another, for he was an expert in all salon games and agood teacher as well. He always came home sober, not disturbing his daughter, despite the factthat he had his first anisette when he awoke and continued chewing the end of his unlit cigar anddrinking at regular intervals throughout the day. One night, however, Fermina heard him come in.
She heard his cossack's step on the stair, his heavy breathing in the second-floor hallway, hispounding with the flat of his hand on her bedroom door. She opened it, and for the first time shewas frightened by his twisted eye and the slurring of his words.
"We are ruined," he said. "Total ruin, so now you know."That was all he said, and he never said it again, and nothing happened to indicate whether hehad told the truth, but after that night Fermina Daza knew that she was alone in the world. Shelived in a social limbo. Her former schoolmates were in a heaven that was closed to her, above allafter the dishonour of her expulsion, and she was not a neighbour to her neighbours, because theyhad known her without a past, in the uniform of the Academy of the Presentation of the BlessedVirgin. Her father's world was one of traders and stevedores, of war refugees in the public shelterof the Parish Caf? of solitary men. In the last year the painting classes had alleviated her seclusionsomewhat, for the teacher preferred group classes and would bring the other pupils to the sewingroom. But they were girls of varying and undefined social circumstances, and for Fermina Dazathey were no more than borrowed friends whose affection ended with each class. Hildebrandawanted to open the house, air it, bring in her father's musicians and fireworks and castles ofgunpowder, and have a Carnival dance whose gale winds would clear out her cousin's moth-eatenspirit, but she soon realised that her proposals were to no avail, and for a very simple reason: therewa