Love in the Time of Cholera (40 page)

“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 the door, he said, with his eyes looking off into the distance:

“And you, Señorita, feel free to carry on. I swear by my honor that I have not seen your face.”

The matter was not mentioned again, but the following week it was impossible to work in Florentino Ariza’s office. On Monday the electricians burst in to install a rotating fan on the ceiling.
The locksmiths arrived unannounced and with as much noise as if they were going to war, installed a lock on the door so that it could be bolted from the inside. The carpenters took measurements without saying why, the upholsterers brought swatches of cretonne to see if they matched the color of the walls, and the next week an enormous double couch covered in a Dionysian flowered print was delivered
through the window because it was too big for the doors. They worked at the oddest hours, with an impertinence that did not seem unintentional, and they offered the same response to all his protests: “Orders from the head office.” Florentino Ariza never knew if this sort of interference was a kindness on his uncle’s part or a very personal way of forcing him to face up to his abusive behavior.
The truth never occurred to him, which was that Uncle Leo XII was encouraging his nephew, because he, too, had heard the rumors that his habits were different from those of most men, and this obstacle to naming him as his successor had caused him great distress.

Unlike his brother, Leo XII Loayza had enjoyed a stable marriage of sixty years’ duration, and he was always proud of not working on
Sundays. He had four sons and a daughter, and he wanted to prepare
all of them as heirs to his empire, but by a series of coincidences that were common in the novels of the day, but that no one believed in real life, his four sons died, one after the other, as they rose to positions of authority, and his daughter had no river vocation whatsoever and preferred to die watching the boats on the Hudson
from a window fifty meters high. There were even those who accepted as true the tale that Florentino Ariza, with his sinister appearance and his vampire’s umbrella, had somehow been the cause of all those coincidences.

When doctor’s orders forced his uncle into retirement, Florentino Ariza began, with good grace, to sacrifice some of his Sunday loves. He accompanied his uncle to his country retreat
in one of the city’s first automobiles, whose crank handle had such a powerful recoil that it had dislocated the shoulder of the first driver. They talked for many hours, the old man in the hammock with his name embroidered in silk thread, removed from everything and with his back to the sea, in the old slave plantation from whose terraces, filled with crepe myrtle, one could see the snow-covered
peaks of the sierra in the afternoon. It had always been difficult for Florentino Ariza and his uncle to talk about anything other than river navigation, and it still was on those slow afternoons when death was always an unseen guest. One of Uncle Leo XII’s constant preoccupations was that river navigation not pass into the hands of entrepreneurs from the interior with connections to European
corporations. “This has always been a business run by people from the coast,” he would say. “If the inlanders get hold of it, they will give it back to the Germans.” His preoccupation was consistent with a political conviction that he liked to repeat even when it was not to the point.

“I am almost one hundred years old, and I have seen everything change, even the position of the stars in the
universe, but I have not seen anything change yet in this country,” he would say. “Here they make new constitutions, new laws, new wars every three months, but we are still in colonial times.”

To his brother Masons, who attributed all evils to the failure of federalism, he would always reply: “The War of a Thousand Days was lost twenty-three years ago in the war of ’76.” Florentino Ariza, whose
indifference to politics hovered on the limits of the absolute, listened to these increasingly frequent and tiresome speeches as one
listens to the sound of the sea. But he was a rigorous debater when it came to company policy. In opposition to his uncle’s opinion, he thought that the setbacks in river navigation, always on the edge of disaster, could be remedied only by a voluntary renunciation
of the riverboat monopoly that the National Congress had granted to the River Company of the Caribbean for ninety-nine years and a day. His uncle protested: “My namesake Leona with her worthless anarchist theories has put those ideas in your head.” But that was only half true. Florentino Ariza based his thinking on the experience of the German commodore Johann B. Elbers, whose noble intelligence
had been destroyed by excessive personal ambition. His uncle, however, believed that the failure of Elbers was due not to privileges but to the unrealistic commitments he had contracted for, which had almost been tantamount to his assuming responsibility for the geography of the nation: he had taken charge of maintaining the navigability of the river, the port installations, the access routes on
land, the means of transportation. Besides, he would say, the virulent opposition of President Simón Bolívar was no laughing matter.

Most of his business associates viewed those disputes as if they were matrimonial arguments, in which both parties are right. The old man’s obstinacy seemed natural to them, not because, as it was too easy to say, old age had made him less visionary than he had
always been, but because renouncing the monopoly must have seemed to him like throwing away the victories of a historic battle that he and his brothers had waged unaided, back in heroic times, against powerful adversaries from all over the world. Which is why no one opposed him when he kept so tight a hold on his rights that no one could touch them before their legal expiration. But suddenly, when
Florentino Ariza had already surrendered his weapons during those meditative afternoons on the plantation, Uncle Leo XII agreed to renounce the centenarian privilege, on the one honorable condition that it not take place before his death.

It was his final act. He did not speak of business again, he did not even allow anyone to consult with him, he did not lose a single ringlet from his splendid
imperial head or an iota of his lucidity, but he did everything possible to keep anyone from seeing him who might pity him. He passed the days in contemplation of the perpetual snows from his terrace, rocking slowly in a Viennese rocker next to
a table where the servants always kept a pot of black coffee hot for him, along with a glass of water with boric acid that contained two plates of false
teeth, which he no longer used except to receive visitors. He saw very few friends, and he would speak only of a past so remote that it antedated river navigation. But he still had one new topic of conversation left: his desire that Florentino Ariza marry. He expressed his wish to him several times, and always in the same way:

“If I were fifty years younger,” he would say, “I would marry my namesake
Leona. I cannot imagine a better wife.”

Florentino Ariza trembled at the idea of his labor of so many years being frustrated at the last moment by this unforeseen circumstance. He would have preferred to renounce everything, throw it all away, die, rather than fail Fermina Daza. Fortunately, Uncle Leo XII did not insist. When he turned ninety-two, he recognized his nephew as sole heir and retired
from the company.

Six months later, by unanimous agreement, Florentino Ariza was named President of the Board of Directors and General Manager of the company. After the champagne toast on the day he took over the post, the old lion in retirement excused himself for speaking without getting up from the rocker, and he improvised a brief speech that seemed more like an elegy. He said that his life
had begun and ended with two providential events. The first was that The Liberator had carried him in his arms in the village of Turbaco when he was making his ill-fated journey toward death. The other had been finding, despite all the obstacles that destiny had interposed, a successor worthy of the company. At last, trying to undramatize the drama, he concluded: