Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
confidences, sobs of love magnified by phantasmal acoustics and the hot fragrance of jasmine in the narrow, sleeping streets. Once again Florentino Ariza had to summon all his strength not to reveal to Leona Cassiani his repressed love for Fermina Daza. They walked together with measured steps, loving each other like unhurried old sweethearts, she thinking about the charms of Cabiria and he thinking about his own misfortune. A man was singing on a balcony in the Plaza of the Customhouse, and his song was repeated throughout the area in a chain of echoes: When I was sailing across the immense waves of the sea. On Saints of Stone Street, just when he should have said good night at her door, Florentino Ariza asked Leona Cassiani to invite him in for a brandy. It was the second time he had made such a request to her under comparable circumstances. The first time, ten years before, she had said to him: "If you come in at this hour you will have to stay forever." He did not go in. But he would do so now, even if he had to break his word afterward. Nevertheless, Leona Cassiani invited him in and asked for no promises.
That was how he found himself, when he least expected it, in the sanctuary of a love that had been extinguished before it was born. Her parents had died, her only brother had made his fortune in Curacao, and she was living alone in the old family house. Years before, when he had still not renounced the hope of making her his lover, with the consent of her parents Florentino Ariza would visit her on Sundays, and sometimes until very late at night, and he had contributed so much to the household that he came to consider it his own. But that night after the film he had the feeling that his memory had been erased from the drawing room. The furniture had been moved, there were new prints hanging on the walls, and he thought that so many heartless changes had been made in order to perpetuate the certainty that he had never lived. The cat did not recognize him. Dismayed by the cruelty of oblivion, he said: "He does not remember me anymore." But she replied over her shoulder, as she was fixing the brandies, that if he was bothered by that he could rest easy, because cats do not remember anyone.
Leaning back as they sat close together on the sofa, they spoke about themselves, about what they had been before they met one afternoon who knows how long ago on the mule-drawn trolley. Their lives were spent in adjacent offices, and until now they had never spoken of anything except their daily work. As they talked, Florentino Ariza put his hand on her thigh, he began to caress her with the gentle touch of an experienced seducer, and she did not stop him, but she did not respond either, not even with a shudder for courtesy's sake. Only when he tried to go further did she grasp his exploratory hand and kiss him on the palm.
"Behave yourself," she said. "I realized a long time ago that you are not the man I am looking for."
While she was still very young, a strong, able man whose face she never saw took her by surprise, threw her down on the jetty, ripped her clothes off, and made instantaneous and frenetic love to her. Lying there on the rocks, her body covered with cuts and bruises, she had wanted that man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms. She had not seen his face, she had not heard his voice, but she was sure she would have known him in a crowd of a thousand men because of his shape and size and his way of making love. From that time on, she would say to anyone who would listen to her: "If you ever hear of a big, strong fellow who raped a poor black girl from the street on Drowned Men's Jetty, one October fifteenth at about half-past eleven at night, tell him where he can find me." She said it out of habit, and she had said it to so many people that she no longer had any hope. Florentino Ariza had heard the story as many times as he had heard a boat sailing away in the night. By two o'clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was waiting for, and he was glad to know it.
"Bravo, lionlady," he said when he left. "We have killed the tiger."
It was not the only thing that came to an end that night. The evil lie about the pavilion of consumptives had ruined his sleep, for it had instilled in him the inconceivable idea that Fermina Daza was mortal and as a consequence might die before her husband. But when he saw her stumble at the door of the movie theater, by his own volition he took another step toward the abyss with the sudden realization that he, and not she, might be the one to die first. It was the most fearful kind of presentiment, because it was based on reality. The years of immobilized waiting, of hoping for good luck, were behind him, but on the horizon he could see nothing more than the unfathomable sea of imaginary illnesses, the drop-by-drop urinations of sleepless nights, the daily death at twilight. He thought that all the moments in the day, which had once been his allies and sworn accomplices, were beginning to conspire against him. A few years before he had gone to a dangerous assignation, his heart heavy with terror of what might happen, and he had found the door unlocked and the hinges recently oiled so that he could come in without a sound, but he repented at the last moment for fear of causing a decent married woman irreparable harm by dying in her bed. So that it was reasonable to think that the woman he loved most on earth, the one he had waited for from one century to the next without a sigh of disenchantment, might not have the opportunity to lead him by the arm across a street full of lunar grave mounds and beds of windblown poppies in order to help him reach the other side of death in safety.
The truth is that by the standards of his time, Florentino Ariza had crossed the line into old age. He was fifty-six well-preserved years old, and he thought them well lived because they were years of love. But no man of the time would have braved the ridicule of looking young at his age, even if he did or thought he did, and none would have dared to confess without shame that he still wept in secret over a rebuff received in the previous century. It was a bad time for being young: there was a style of dress for each age, but the style of old age began soon after adolescence, and lasted until the grave. More than age, it was a matter of social dignity. The young men dressed like their grandfathers, they made themselves more respectable with premature spectacles, and a walking stick was looked upon with favor after the age of thirty. For women there were only two ages: the age for marrying, which did not go past twenty-two, and the age for being eternal spinsters: the ones left behind. The others, the married women, the mothers, the widows, the grandmothers, were a race apart who tallied their age not in relation to the number of years they had lived but in relation to the time left to them before they died.
Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, faced the insidious snares of old age with savage temerity, even though he knew that his peculiar fate had been to look like an old man from the time he was a boy. At first it was a matter of necessity. Transito Ariza pulled apart and then sewed together again for him the clothes that his father decided to discard, so that he went to primary school wearing frock coats that dragged on the ground when he sat down, and ministerial hats that came down over his ears despite the cotton batting on the inside to make them smaller. Since he had also worn glasses for myopia from the age of five, and had his mother's Indian hair, as bristly and coarse as horsehair, his appearance clarified nothing. It was fortunate that after so much governmental instability because of so many superimposed civil wars, academic standards were less selective than they had been, and there was a jumble of backgrounds and social positions in the public schools. Half-grown children would come to class from the barricades, smelling of gunpowder, wearing the insignias and uniforms of rebel officers captured at gunpoint in inconclusive battles, and carrying their regulation weapons in full view at their waists. They shot each other over disagreements in the playground, they threatened the teachers if they received low grades on examinations, and one of them, a third-year student at La Salle Academy and a retired colonel in the militia, shot and killed Brother Juan Eremita, Prefect of the Community, because he said in catechism class that God was a full-fledged member of the Conservative Party.
On the other hand, the sons of the great ruined families were dressed like old-fashioned princes, and some very poor boys went barefoot. Among so many oddities originating in so many places, Florentino Ariza was certainly among the oddest, but not to the point of attracting undue attention. The harshest thing he heard was when someone shouted to him on the street: "When you're ugly and poor, you can only want more." In any event, the apparel imposed by necessity became, from that time on and for the rest of his life, the kind best suited to his enigmatic nature and solemn character. When he was promoted to his first important position in the R.C.C., he had clothes made to order in the same style as those of his father, whom he recalled as an old man who had died at Christ's venerable age of thirty-three. So that Florentino Ariza always looked much older than he was. As a matter of fact, the loose-tongued Brigida Zuleta, a brief love who dished up unwashed truths, told him on the very first day that she liked him better without his clothes because he looked twenty years younger when he was naked. However, he never knew how to remedy that, first because his personal taste would not allow him to dress in any other way, and second because at the age of twenty no one knew how to dress like a younger man, unless he were to take his short pants and sailor hat out of the closet again. On the other hand, he himself could not escape the notion of old age current in his day, so it was to be expected that when he saw Fermina Daza stumble at the door of the movie theater he would be shaken by a thunderbolt of panic that death, the son of a bitch, would win an irreparable victory in his fierce war of love.
Until that time his greatest battle, fought tooth and nail and lost without glory, was against baldness. From the moment he saw the first hairs tangled in his comb, he knew that he was condemned to a hell whose torments cannot be imagined by those who do not suffer them. He struggled for years. There was not a pomade or lotion he did not try, a belief he did not accept, a sacrifice he did not endure, in order to defend every inch of his head against the ravages of that devastation. He memorized the agricultural information in the Bristol Almanac because he had heard that there was a direct relationship between the growth of hair and the harvesting cycles. He left the totally bald barber he had used all his life for a foreign newcomer who cut hair only when the moon was in the first quarter. The new barber had begun to demonstrate that in fact he had a fertile hand, when it was discovered that he was wanted by several Antillean police forces for raping novices, and he was taken away in chains.
By then Florentino Ariza had cut out every advertisement concerning baldness that he found in the newspapers of the Caribbean basin, the ones in which they printed two pictures of the same man, first as bald as a melon and then with more hair than a lion: before and after using the infallible cure. After six years he had tried one hundred seventy-two of them, in addition to complementary treatments that appeared on the labels of the bottles, and all that he achieved was an itching, foul-smelling eczema of the scalp called ringworm borealis by the medicine men of Martinique because it emitted a phosphorescent glow in the dark. As a last resort he had recourse to all the herbs that the Indians hawked in the public market and to all the magical specifics and Oriental potions sold in the Arcade of the Scribes, but by the time he realized that he had been swindled, he already had the tonsure of a saint. In the year 1900, while the Civil War of a Thousand Days bled the country, an Italian who made custom-fitted wigs of human hair came to the city. The wigs cost a fortune, and the manufacturer took no responsibility after three months of use, but there were few solvent bald men who did not succumb to the temptation. Florentino Ariza was one of the first. He tried on a wig that was so similar to his own hair that he was afraid it would stand on end with his changes in mood, but he could not accept the idea of wearing a dead man's hair on his head. His only consolation was that his raging baldness meant that he would not have to watch his hair turn gray. One day, one of the genial drunks on the river docks embraced him with more enthusiasm than usual when he saw him leave the office, and then he removed Florentino Ariza's hat, to the mocking laughter of the stevedores, and gave him a resounding kiss on the head.
"Hairless wonder!" he shouted.
That night, at the age of forty-eight, he had the few downy strands left at his temples and the nape of his neck cut off, and he embraced with all his heart his destiny of total baldness. Every morning before his bath he lathered not only his chin but the areas on his scalp where stubble was beginning to reappear, and with a barber's razor he left everything as smooth as a baby's bottom. Until then he would not remove his hat even in the office, for his baldness produced a sensation of nakedness that seemed indecent to him. But when he accepted his baldness with all his heart, he attributed to it the masculine virtues that he had heard about and scorned as nothing but the fantasies of bald men. Later he took refuge in the new custom of combing long hairs from his part on the right all the way across his head, and this he never abandoned. But even so, he continued to wear his hat, always the same funereal style, even after the tartarita, the local name for the straw skimmer, came into fashion.
The loss of his teeth, on the other hand, did not result from a natural calamity but from the shoddy work of an itinerant dentist who decided to eradicate a simple infection by drastic means. His terror of the drill had prevented Florentino Ariza from visiting a dentist, despite his constant toothaches, until the pain became unbearable. His mother was alarmed by a night of inconsolable moaning from the room next to hers, because these moans seemed to be the same as the ones from another time, which had almost disappeared in the mists of her memory, but when she made him open his mouth to see where love was hurting him, she discovered that he had fallen victim to abscesses.
Uncle Leo XII sent him to Dr. Francis Adonay, a black giant in gaiters and jodhpurs who traveled the riverboats with complete dental equipment that he carried in a steward's saddlebag, and who seemed to be more like a traveling salesman of terror in the villages along the river. With just one glance in his mouth, he decided that Florentino Ariza had to have even his healthy teeth and molars extracted in order to protect him once and for all from further misfortunes. In contrast to baldness, this radical treatment caused him no alarm at all, except for his natural fear of a bloodbath without anesthesia. The idea of false teeth did not disturb him either, first because one of his fondest childhood memories was of a carnival magician who removed his upper and lower teeth and left them chattering by themselves on a table, and second because it would end the toothaches that had tormented him, ever since he was a boy, with almost as much cruelty as the pains of love. Unlike baldness, it did not seem to him an underhanded attack by old age, because he was convinced that despite the bitter breath of vulcanized rubber, his appearance would be cleaner with an orthopedic smile. So he submitted without resistance to the red-hot forceps of Dr. Adonay, and he endured his convalescence with the stoicism of a pack mule.
Uncle Leo XII attended to the details of the operation as if it were being performed on his own flesh. His singular interest in false teeth had developed on one of his first trips along the Magdalena River and was the result of his maniacal love for bel canto. One night when the moon was full, at the entrance to the port of Gamarra, he made a wager with a German surveyor that he could awaken the creatures of the jungle by singing a Neapolitan romanza from the Captain's balustrade. He almost lost the bet. In the river darkness one could hear the flapping wings of the cranes in the marshes, the thudding tails of the alligators, the terror of the shad as they tried to leap onto dry land, but on the final note, when it was feared that the singer would burst his arteries with the power of his song, his false teeth dropped out of his mouth with his last breath and fell into the water.
The boat had to wait three days at the port of Tenerife while an emergency set was made for him. It was a perfect fit. But on the voyage home, trying to explain to the Captain how he had lost the first pair, Uncle Leo XII filled his lungs with the burning air of the jungle, sang the highest note he could, held it to his last breath as he tried to frighten the alligators that were sunning themselves and watching the passage of the boat with unblinking eyes, and the new set of false teeth sank into the current as well. From then on, he kept spare sets of teeth everywhere, in various places throughout his house, in his desk drawer, and on each of the three company boats. Moreover, when he ate out he would carry an extra pair in a cough drop box that he kept in his pocket, because he had once broken a pair trying to eat pork cracklings at a picnic. Fearing that his nephew might be the victim of similar unpleasant surprises, Uncle Leo XII told Dr. Adonay to make him two sets right from the start: one of cheap materials for daily use at the office, and the other for Sundays and holidays, with a gold chip in the first molar that would impart a touch of realism. At last, on a Palm Sunday ringing with the sound of holiday bells, Florentino Ariza returned to the street with a new identity, his perfect smile giving him the impression that someone else had taken his place in the world.
This was at the time that his mother died and Florentino Ariza was left alone in his house. It was a haven that suited his way of loving, because the location was discreet despite the fact that the numerous windows that gave the street its name made one think of too many eyes behind the curtains. But the house had been built to make Fermina Daza, and no one but Fermina Daza, happy, so that Florentino Ariza preferred to lose a good many opportunities during his most fruitful years rather than soil his house with other loves. To his good fortune, every step he climbed in the R.C.C. brought new privileges, above all secret privileges, and one of the most practical was the possibility of using the offices at night, or on Sundays or holidays, with the complicity of the watchmen. Once, when he was First Vice President, he was making emergency love to one of the Sunday girls, sitting on a desk chair with her astride him, when the door opened without warning. Uncle Leo XII peered in, as if he had walked into the wrong office, and stared at his terrified nephew over his eyeglasses. "I'll be damned!" said his uncle, without the least sign of shock. "You screw just like your dad!" And before he closed
That was how he found himself, when he least expected it, in the sanctuary of a love that had been extinguished before it was born. Her parents had died, her only brother had made his fortune in Curacao, and she was living alone in the old family house. Years before, when he had still not renounced the hope of making her his lover, with the consent of her parents Florentino Ariza would visit her on Sundays, and sometimes until very late at night, and he had contributed so much to the household that he came to consider it his own. But that night after the film he had the feeling that his memory had been erased from the drawing room. The furniture had been moved, there were new prints hanging on the walls, and he thought that so many heartless changes had been made in order to perpetuate the certainty that he had never lived. The cat did not recognize him. Dismayed by the cruelty of oblivion, he said: "He does not remember me anymore." But she replied over her shoulder, as she was fixing the brandies, that if he was bothered by that he could rest easy, because cats do not remember anyone.
Leaning back as they sat close together on the sofa, they spoke about themselves, about what they had been before they met one afternoon who knows how long ago on the mule-drawn trolley. Their lives were spent in adjacent offices, and until now they had never spoken of anything except their daily work. As they talked, Florentino Ariza put his hand on her thigh, he began to caress her with the gentle touch of an experienced seducer, and she did not stop him, but she did not respond either, not even with a shudder for courtesy's sake. Only when he tried to go further did she grasp his exploratory hand and kiss him on the palm.
"Behave yourself," she said. "I realized a long time ago that you are not the man I am looking for."
While she was still very young, a strong, able man whose face she never saw took her by surprise, threw her down on the jetty, ripped her clothes off, and made instantaneous and frenetic love to her. Lying there on the rocks, her body covered with cuts and bruises, she had wanted that man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms. She had not seen his face, she had not heard his voice, but she was sure she would have known him in a crowd of a thousand men because of his shape and size and his way of making love. From that time on, she would say to anyone who would listen to her: "If you ever hear of a big, strong fellow who raped a poor black girl from the street on Drowned Men's Jetty, one October fifteenth at about half-past eleven at night, tell him where he can find me." She said it out of habit, and she had said it to so many people that she no longer had any hope. Florentino Ariza had heard the story as many times as he had heard a boat sailing away in the night. By two o'clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was waiting for, and he was glad to know it.
"Bravo, lionlady," he said when he left. "We have killed the tiger."
It was not the only thing that came to an end that night. The evil lie about the pavilion of consumptives had ruined his sleep, for it had instilled in him the inconceivable idea that Fermina Daza was mortal and as a consequence might die before her husband. But when he saw her stumble at the door of the movie theater, by his own volition he took another step toward the abyss with the sudden realization that he, and not she, might be the one to die first. It was the most fearful kind of presentiment, because it was based on reality. The years of immobilized waiting, of hoping for good luck, were behind him, but on the horizon he could see nothing more than the unfathomable sea of imaginary illnesses, the drop-by-drop urinations of sleepless nights, the daily death at twilight. He thought that all the moments in the day, which had once been his allies and sworn accomplices, were beginning to conspire against him. A few years before he had gone to a dangerous assignation, his heart heavy with terror of what might happen, and he had found the door unlocked and the hinges recently oiled so that he could come in without a sound, but he repented at the last moment for fear of causing a decent married woman irreparable harm by dying in her bed. So that it was reasonable to think that the woman he loved most on earth, the one he had waited for from one century to the next without a sigh of disenchantment, might not have the opportunity to lead him by the arm across a street full of lunar grave mounds and beds of windblown poppies in order to help him reach the other side of death in safety.
The truth is that by the standards of his time, Florentino Ariza had crossed the line into old age. He was fifty-six well-preserved years old, and he thought them well lived because they were years of love. But no man of the time would have braved the ridicule of looking young at his age, even if he did or thought he did, and none would have dared to confess without shame that he still wept in secret over a rebuff received in the previous century. It was a bad time for being young: there was a style of dress for each age, but the style of old age began soon after adolescence, and lasted until the grave. More than age, it was a matter of social dignity. The young men dressed like their grandfathers, they made themselves more respectable with premature spectacles, and a walking stick was looked upon with favor after the age of thirty. For women there were only two ages: the age for marrying, which did not go past twenty-two, and the age for being eternal spinsters: the ones left behind. The others, the married women, the mothers, the widows, the grandmothers, were a race apart who tallied their age not in relation to the number of years they had lived but in relation to the time left to them before they died.
Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, faced the insidious snares of old age with savage temerity, even though he knew that his peculiar fate had been to look like an old man from the time he was a boy. At first it was a matter of necessity. Transito Ariza pulled apart and then sewed together again for him the clothes that his father decided to discard, so that he went to primary school wearing frock coats that dragged on the ground when he sat down, and ministerial hats that came down over his ears despite the cotton batting on the inside to make them smaller. Since he had also worn glasses for myopia from the age of five, and had his mother's Indian hair, as bristly and coarse as horsehair, his appearance clarified nothing. It was fortunate that after so much governmental instability because of so many superimposed civil wars, academic standards were less selective than they had been, and there was a jumble of backgrounds and social positions in the public schools. Half-grown children would come to class from the barricades, smelling of gunpowder, wearing the insignias and uniforms of rebel officers captured at gunpoint in inconclusive battles, and carrying their regulation weapons in full view at their waists. They shot each other over disagreements in the playground, they threatened the teachers if they received low grades on examinations, and one of them, a third-year student at La Salle Academy and a retired colonel in the militia, shot and killed Brother Juan Eremita, Prefect of the Community, because he said in catechism class that God was a full-fledged member of the Conservative Party.
On the other hand, the sons of the great ruined families were dressed like old-fashioned princes, and some very poor boys went barefoot. Among so many oddities originating in so many places, Florentino Ariza was certainly among the oddest, but not to the point of attracting undue attention. The harshest thing he heard was when someone shouted to him on the street: "When you're ugly and poor, you can only want more." In any event, the apparel imposed by necessity became, from that time on and for the rest of his life, the kind best suited to his enigmatic nature and solemn character. When he was promoted to his first important position in the R.C.C., he had clothes made to order in the same style as those of his father, whom he recalled as an old man who had died at Christ's venerable age of thirty-three. So that Florentino Ariza always looked much older than he was. As a matter of fact, the loose-tongued Brigida Zuleta, a brief love who dished up unwashed truths, told him on the very first day that she liked him better without his clothes because he looked twenty years younger when he was naked. However, he never knew how to remedy that, first because his personal taste would not allow him to dress in any other way, and second because at the age of twenty no one knew how to dress like a younger man, unless he were to take his short pants and sailor hat out of the closet again. On the other hand, he himself could not escape the notion of old age current in his day, so it was to be expected that when he saw Fermina Daza stumble at the door of the movie theater he would be shaken by a thunderbolt of panic that death, the son of a bitch, would win an irreparable victory in his fierce war of love.
Until that time his greatest battle, fought tooth and nail and lost without glory, was against baldness. From the moment he saw the first hairs tangled in his comb, he knew that he was condemned to a hell whose torments cannot be imagined by those who do not suffer them. He struggled for years. There was not a pomade or lotion he did not try, a belief he did not accept, a sacrifice he did not endure, in order to defend every inch of his head against the ravages of that devastation. He memorized the agricultural information in the Bristol Almanac because he had heard that there was a direct relationship between the growth of hair and the harvesting cycles. He left the totally bald barber he had used all his life for a foreign newcomer who cut hair only when the moon was in the first quarter. The new barber had begun to demonstrate that in fact he had a fertile hand, when it was discovered that he was wanted by several Antillean police forces for raping novices, and he was taken away in chains.
By then Florentino Ariza had cut out every advertisement concerning baldness that he found in the newspapers of the Caribbean basin, the ones in which they printed two pictures of the same man, first as bald as a melon and then with more hair than a lion: before and after using the infallible cure. After six years he had tried one hundred seventy-two of them, in addition to complementary treatments that appeared on the labels of the bottles, and all that he achieved was an itching, foul-smelling eczema of the scalp called ringworm borealis by the medicine men of Martinique because it emitted a phosphorescent glow in the dark. As a last resort he had recourse to all the herbs that the Indians hawked in the public market and to all the magical specifics and Oriental potions sold in the Arcade of the Scribes, but by the time he realized that he had been swindled, he already had the tonsure of a saint. In the year 1900, while the Civil War of a Thousand Days bled the country, an Italian who made custom-fitted wigs of human hair came to the city. The wigs cost a fortune, and the manufacturer took no responsibility after three months of use, but there were few solvent bald men who did not succumb to the temptation. Florentino Ariza was one of the first. He tried on a wig that was so similar to his own hair that he was afraid it would stand on end with his changes in mood, but he could not accept the idea of wearing a dead man's hair on his head. His only consolation was that his raging baldness meant that he would not have to watch his hair turn gray. One day, one of the genial drunks on the river docks embraced him with more enthusiasm than usual when he saw him leave the office, and then he removed Florentino Ariza's hat, to the mocking laughter of the stevedores, and gave him a resounding kiss on the head.
"Hairless wonder!" he shouted.
That night, at the age of forty-eight, he had the few downy strands left at his temples and the nape of his neck cut off, and he embraced with all his heart his destiny of total baldness. Every morning before his bath he lathered not only his chin but the areas on his scalp where stubble was beginning to reappear, and with a barber's razor he left everything as smooth as a baby's bottom. Until then he would not remove his hat even in the office, for his baldness produced a sensation of nakedness that seemed indecent to him. But when he accepted his baldness with all his heart, he attributed to it the masculine virtues that he had heard about and scorned as nothing but the fantasies of bald men. Later he took refuge in the new custom of combing long hairs from his part on the right all the way across his head, and this he never abandoned. But even so, he continued to wear his hat, always the same funereal style, even after the tartarita, the local name for the straw skimmer, came into fashion.
The loss of his teeth, on the other hand, did not result from a natural calamity but from the shoddy work of an itinerant dentist who decided to eradicate a simple infection by drastic means. His terror of the drill had prevented Florentino Ariza from visiting a dentist, despite his constant toothaches, until the pain became unbearable. His mother was alarmed by a night of inconsolable moaning from the room next to hers, because these moans seemed to be the same as the ones from another time, which had almost disappeared in the mists of her memory, but when she made him open his mouth to see where love was hurting him, she discovered that he had fallen victim to abscesses.
Uncle Leo XII sent him to Dr. Francis Adonay, a black giant in gaiters and jodhpurs who traveled the riverboats with complete dental equipment that he carried in a steward's saddlebag, and who seemed to be more like a traveling salesman of terror in the villages along the river. With just one glance in his mouth, he decided that Florentino Ariza had to have even his healthy teeth and molars extracted in order to protect him once and for all from further misfortunes. In contrast to baldness, this radical treatment caused him no alarm at all, except for his natural fear of a bloodbath without anesthesia. The idea of false teeth did not disturb him either, first because one of his fondest childhood memories was of a carnival magician who removed his upper and lower teeth and left them chattering by themselves on a table, and second because it would end the toothaches that had tormented him, ever since he was a boy, with almost as much cruelty as the pains of love. Unlike baldness, it did not seem to him an underhanded attack by old age, because he was convinced that despite the bitter breath of vulcanized rubber, his appearance would be cleaner with an orthopedic smile. So he submitted without resistance to the red-hot forceps of Dr. Adonay, and he endured his convalescence with the stoicism of a pack mule.
Uncle Leo XII attended to the details of the operation as if it were being performed on his own flesh. His singular interest in false teeth had developed on one of his first trips along the Magdalena River and was the result of his maniacal love for bel canto. One night when the moon was full, at the entrance to the port of Gamarra, he made a wager with a German surveyor that he could awaken the creatures of the jungle by singing a Neapolitan romanza from the Captain's balustrade. He almost lost the bet. In the river darkness one could hear the flapping wings of the cranes in the marshes, the thudding tails of the alligators, the terror of the shad as they tried to leap onto dry land, but on the final note, when it was feared that the singer would burst his arteries with the power of his song, his false teeth dropped out of his mouth with his last breath and fell into the water.
The boat had to wait three days at the port of Tenerife while an emergency set was made for him. It was a perfect fit. But on the voyage home, trying to explain to the Captain how he had lost the first pair, Uncle Leo XII filled his lungs with the burning air of the jungle, sang the highest note he could, held it to his last breath as he tried to frighten the alligators that were sunning themselves and watching the passage of the boat with unblinking eyes, and the new set of false teeth sank into the current as well. From then on, he kept spare sets of teeth everywhere, in various places throughout his house, in his desk drawer, and on each of the three company boats. Moreover, when he ate out he would carry an extra pair in a cough drop box that he kept in his pocket, because he had once broken a pair trying to eat pork cracklings at a picnic. Fearing that his nephew might be the victim of similar unpleasant surprises, Uncle Leo XII told Dr. Adonay to make him two sets right from the start: one of cheap materials for daily use at the office, and the other for Sundays and holidays, with a gold chip in the first molar that would impart a touch of realism. At last, on a Palm Sunday ringing with the sound of holiday bells, Florentino Ariza returned to the street with a new identity, his perfect smile giving him the impression that someone else had taken his place in the world.
This was at the time that his mother died and Florentino Ariza was left alone in his house. It was a haven that suited his way of loving, because the location was discreet despite the fact that the numerous windows that gave the street its name made one think of too many eyes behind the curtains. But the house had been built to make Fermina Daza, and no one but Fermina Daza, happy, so that Florentino Ariza preferred to lose a good many opportunities during his most fruitful years rather than soil his house with other loves. To his good fortune, every step he climbed in the R.C.C. brought new privileges, above all secret privileges, and one of the most practical was the possibility of using the offices at night, or on Sundays or holidays, with the complicity of the watchmen. Once, when he was First Vice President, he was making emergency love to one of the Sunday girls, sitting on a desk chair with her astride him, when the door opened without warning. Uncle Leo XII peered in, as if he had walked into the wrong office, and stared at his terrified nephew over his eyeglasses. "I'll be damned!" said his uncle, without the least sign of shock. "You screw just like your dad!" And before he closed