Love in the Time of Cholera

Chapter 3
Inevitably, the smell of bitter almonds always reminded him of his fate after love was thwarted.Dr. Juvenal Urbino detected the smell as soon as he entered the room, which was still in darkness.He was here to deal with an emergency, but since many years ago, such incidents have not considered urgent to him.Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, an exile from the Antilles, maimed in war, photographer of children, and the doctor's closest chess opponent, has now been erased from memory by fumes of gold cyanide. freed from the pain.

Doctors saw the dead man lying under a blanket on the same camp bed he had been sleeping on during his lifetime.On a nearby stool stood the keg used to vaporize the poison.On the ground lay a black Great Dane with a white chest, chained to the foot of a cot.Next to the dog's body was a pair of crutches.The stuffy and messy room is both a bedroom and a studio. At this moment, as the morning sun shines in through the open window, it begins to have a glimmer of light.But just this trace is enough to make people instantly feel the deterrent force of death.The other windows and all the gaps in the room were either tightly covered with rags or sealed with black cardboard, which added to the oppressive atmosphere.A large table was piled high with unlabeled bottles and cans.Two pewter kegs with their skins peeled off, under an ordinary spotlight with a red paper cover.The third bucket next to the body was used to hold the fixer.There were old magazines and newspapers everywhere, stacks of negatives sandwiched between two panes of glass, and the furniture was in dilapidated condition, but all had been kept spotless by hardworking hands.Although the cool breeze blowing from the window made the air a bit fresher, those familiar with it could still smell the warm aftertaste of unhappy love in the breath of bitter almonds.Dr. Juvenal Urbino had more than once involuntarily thought that this was not the right place to die by the grace of God.But as time went by, he finally figured out that maybe the chaos here was following the secret will of Almighty God.

A police officer arrived here first with a young student who was doing a forensic practice at the city clinic.It was they who, before the arrival of Dr. Urbino, opened the windows for ventilation and covered the body.The two saluted the doctor solemnly.This time, there was more mourning than reverence in the solemnity, for everyone knew the great friendship between the doctor and Jeremiah de Saint-Amour.The venerable doctor shook hands with the two, as he always shook hands with every student before his daily general clinical class.Then, with his forefinger and the ball of his thumb, he lifted the edge of the blanket like picking up a flower, revealing the corpse inch by inch with a divine poise.Jeremiah de Saint-Amor was completely naked, his body was stiff and twisted, his eyes were open, his complexion was bluish, and he seemed to be 50 years older than the night before.His pupils are transparent, his beard and hair are yellow, and there is an old scar on his belly, and there are still many knots tied in sutures.His torso and arms were as thick and powerful as a rowing convict, and his limp legs were like those of an orphan, as he labored on crutches.Dr. Juvenal Urbino gazed at the corpse for a moment and felt a pang in his heart which he had rarely experienced during the long years of futile struggle against death.

"Poor fool," he said to the dead man, "the worst is over."

He covered himself with a blanket, and resumed his academic haughty look.Last year, he had just held three days of official celebrations for his [-]th birthday.In his thank you speech, he once again resisted the temptation to retire.He said: "When I die, there will be plenty of time to rest, but this unforeseen change has not been included in my plan." Although his right ear is becoming more and more useless, and even though he has to rely on a silver-handled cane To conceal his faltering steps, he was still dressed as smartly as he had been in his youth: a linen suit, a gold chain for a pocket watch hanging from his waistcoat.His Pasteur beard, the color of mother-of-pearl, and his hair, carefully combed with a sharp part in the middle, were the truest expressions of his character.For the decline of memory that was more and more disturbing to him, he made up for it by making quick notes on scattered small pieces of paper at any time and place, but in the end, the pockets were full of papers mixed together, which were difficult to distinguish, just like those tools, Vials and other things were jumbled together in his overstuffed suitcase.He was not only the oldest and most prestigious doctor in town, but also the most personable man in town.However, his razor-sharp wit and the overly worldly way he used his name kept him from getting the love he deserved.

His instructions to officers and interns were clear and swift.No autopsy required.The smell in the room was enough to determine that the cause of death was the volatilization of cyanide caused by some photographic acid in the keg, which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour knew so well that it could not have been an accident.Facing the police officer's hesitation, he cut him off in his typical decisive way: "Don't forget, I am the one who signed the death certificate." The young doctor was very disappointed: he had never had the opportunity to study the dead body. The effect of gold cyanide.Dr. Juvenal Urbino was amazed that he had never seen the student in medical school, but his blushing and Andean accent made him understand immediately: perhaps the young man had just arrived in this city. city."In a few days, some love lunatic here will give you that chance," he said, before realizing that, of the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first Together wasn't using cyanide for love misfortune.As a result, there was a slight change in his usual tone.

"Keep an eye out then," he said to the intern. "Dead people usually have metal particles in their hearts."

Then he spoke to the police officer as if to a subordinate.He ordered the officers to bypass all procedures so that the funeral could take place that afternoon and be held as privately as possible.He said: "I will go and talk to the mayor later." He knew that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was an extremely frugal person, with a life that was almost primitive, and that he earned far more money from his craft than he did. There must have been more than enough savings in some drawer in the room to cover the cost of the burial.

"It doesn't matter if you don't find it," he said, "I will bear all the expenses."

He had the police officer tell the newspapers that the photographer had died of natural causes, although he believed the news would not interest the reporters at all.He said: "If necessary, I will speak to the governor." The police officer is a serious and humble public servant. Knowing that the doctor has always been scrupulous about his official duties, which sometimes angered his closest friends, he was surprised that he could be so rash. to skip legal formalities in order to expedite the burial process.The only thing he didn't want to do was to discuss with the Archbishop that Jeremiah de Saint-Amor should be buried in the Holy Land.The officer regretted his faux pas and tried to explain it.

"I know, he's a saint."

"It is even rarer," said Dr. Urbino, "that he is an atheist saint. But these are the business of God."

In the distance, on the other side of the once-colonial city, church bells sounded calling people to High Mass.Dr. Urbino put on his half-moon spectacles and looked at his pocket watch on a gold chain--a square pocket watch of fine workmanship, with a spring-opened cover--or he would miss Pentecost. It's Mass.

In the living room was a giant camera on wheels, like the ones used in parks.The dusk seascape is painted on the curtain with paint from the hand-made workshop.The walls are covered with pictures of children of all sorts of memorable moments: first communion, wearing bunny masks, happy birthdays.Year after year, Dr. Urbino was here, watching the walls gradually become covered in photographs during the rapt attention of the chess game in the afternoon.Many times he thought with aching heart that in this gallery of casual photos, the future of this city was conceived: it would be ruled by children with unstable personalities, and eventually destroyed by them , not even a shred of ashes of its former glory.

On the writing-table, beside a jug of several sailor's pipes, was an unfinished game of chess.Dr. Urbino, in spite of his haste to leave and his gloomy mood, could not resist the temptation to study the mess.He knew it must have been left over from the night before, because Jeremiah de Saint-Amour played chess every evening and with at least three different people every week, but he always finished the game, Then put the chessboard and pieces into the box and put them in a drawer of the desk.The doctor knew that he was always playing with white pieces, and in this game, white would definitely lose within four moves. "If it's really murder, there must be good clues in it." He said to himself, "There is only one person I know who can lay such an exquisite ambush." A soldier who did not complete the last battle in his life?If he doesn't investigate clearly, he will hardly survive.

At six o'clock in the morning, when the night watchman was doing his last round of patrolling, he saw a sign nailed to the gate facing the street saying: Come in without knocking, and please notify the police.Soon, police officers and interns arrived.The pair searched the house, looking for evidence of death other than the unmistakable smell of bitter almonds.During the few minutes that the doctor had stopped to analyze the unfinished chess game, the police officer found among the papers on the desk a letter addressed to Dr. Juvenal Urbino.The envelope was tightly sealed with thick wax, and the envelope had to be torn to get out.In order to brighten the room, the doctor opened the black curtains and quickly glanced at the stack of eleven pages, which were neatly written on both sides.And when he started reading the first paragraph, he knew he would miss the Holy Communion of the Pentecost Mass.He read the letter, breathless with excitement, turning back pages now and then to pick up where he had left off.When he finished reading it, he looked as if he had just come back from a long, long journey.Despite his best efforts to restrain himself, his frustration was palpable: his lips were blue, the color of a corpse, and his fingers trembled uncontrollably as he folded the letter and put it in his vest pocket.Only then did he think of the police officer and the young doctor beside him again, through a fog of pain, he smiled at them.

"Nothing special," he said, "just some last orders from him."

This was only a half-truth, but they accepted it as the whole truth, for they uncovered a floor tile at the doctor's orders, and there they found an old ledger with the combination of the safe.The deceased did not have as much money as they had imagined, but it was enough for the funeral and to settle some small accounts.At this time, Dr. Urbino realized that he would not be able to get to the church until the priest preached the Gospel.

"This is the third time I've missed Sunday Mass since I've been able to remember," he said. "But God will forgive me."

Although he could hardly contain his urgency to share the secret of the letter with his wife, he preferred to wait a few more minutes to arrange the details.He promised to inform the large number of Caribbean exiles in the city, because perhaps they would want to pay their final respects to one of the most respected, active, and radical men, although it is clear that he ultimately paid tribute to the people. Desperate Rump gave in.He would also inform the deceased's chess friends, whether they were prominent professional players or nobodies, as well as other friends who were less frequent with the deceased but who might also want to attend the funeral.Before reading the suicide note, he had decided to be No.1 in charge, but after reading the letter, he was not sure about anything.But anyway, he was going to send a wreath of gardenias, because maybe Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had expressed contrition at the last moment.The funeral was arranged for five o'clock in the afternoon, an appropriate time in the hot season.If you need him, he will be at the country house of Dr. Racides Oliveria from noon onwards, and his protégé will celebrate his 25th year as a doctor with a lavish lunch that day. .

From the first years of hard work, which earned him a respect and a reputation unrivalled in the province, Dr. Juvenal Urbino lived a regular life, following his movements every day.He woke up every morning when the cock crowed, and from that moment began to take some secret recipes: potassium bromide to refresh the mind, salicylates to relieve bone pain on rainy days, a few drops of rye ergot juice to overcome dizziness, belladonna to guarantee sleep well.He took different medicines at different times, always secretly, because in his long career as a doctor and teacher he had always been against the prescription of anti-aging drugs: for him, it was better to suffer other people's pain than to suffer. Own is much easier.He always carried a small packet of camphor in his pocket, which he took out when no one was looking, and took a deep breath to dispel the fear of so many drugs mixed together.

He would first spend an hour in his study preparing for the general clinical class he taught at the medical school at 15 a.m. Monday through Saturday until the day before his death.He was also an avid reader of new literature, mailed to him by his bookseller in Paris and ordered from Barcelona by his local bookseller, though he did not focus as much on Spanish as he did on French.But anyway, he never read literature in the morning, but for an hour after his nap and a little longer at night before bed.After preparing for class, he faced the open window in the bathroom and did breathing exercises for 81 minutes, inhaling and exhaling in the direction of the crowing rooster, because the air there was fresh.He then showers, grooms and gels his beard in the scent of authentic Farina Herhenube cologne, before donning a white linen suit with vest and floppy hat, and a pair of tanned suede boots. At [-], he still retains the suave demeanor and high spirits that he had when he returned from Paris shortly after the cholera.His hair was parted down the middle and neatly combed, just like when he was young, only the color had changed to a metallic color.He has breakfast at home, but the recipe is separate: a cup of big absinthe tea to nourish the stomach, add a head of garlic, break off one by one, and consciously chew with bread to prevent heart failure.After class, he is rarely without activities, either to practice the spirit of civic participation, or to fulfill the obligations in the church, or it is related to his art and social innovation career.

He almost always eats lunch at home and then sits on the patio in the yard for a 10-minute mid-morning nap.In his sleep, he heard the maids singing under the luxuriant mango trees, the cries of vendors on the street, and the roar of oil engines and motors in the bay—the exhaust fumes from them blew up the whole building in the hot afternoon. It filled the room, like the wings of an angel condemned to rot.Afterwards, he spends an hour reading new books, especially novels and histories.He then gives French and vocal lessons to the family parrot, which has been a local sight for many years.At four o'clock, after drinking a large glass of lemonade with ice, he went out to see the sick.Although he is getting old, he still insists on not seeing patients in the clinic, but continuing to visit the patients' homes.He has been doing this ever since cities have been built so that people can walk anywhere in the city.

When he returned from Europe for the first time, he used the four-wheeled carriage at home with two golden bay red horses to travel.When the car broke down, he switched to a single-horse convertible.Later, when the carriage began to disappear from the world, and only a few remained in the city for tourists or to carry wreaths at funerals, he continued to use it with a certain contempt for fashion.Although he refuses to retire, he knows that people only invite him to go when there is basically no way to recover, but he believes that this is also a professional expression.He only needs to look at the patient's complexion to know how the condition is.He was less and less a believer in miracle drugs, and he was very disturbed to see surgery being promoted.He often said: "The scalpel is the most powerful proof that medicine is ineffective." He believes that, in a strict sense, all medicines are toxic, and 70.00% of daily food can also hasten death. "The truth is," he would often say in class, "there are only a few doctors who really understand a handful of drugs." He went from the hot-blooded youth of his youth to what he called a fatalistic humanitarian: "Everyone They are the masters of their own death, and when the time comes, the only thing we can do is help them die without fear and pain.” Despite these extremist ideas (which have even become part of local folk medicine lore), he Former students, even when they had opened their own clinics, still came to him because they saw him as what was then called a "diagnostic eye."All in all, he had been an expensive and excellent doctor, and his patients were concentrated among the prominent families in the Governor's District.

His daily routine was so organized that his wife always knew where to send him a message if there was an emergency during the afternoon visits.As a young man, before returning home, he would stop at the Parish Café, where he perfected his chess skills with his father-in-law's cronies and a few Caribbean exiles.But from the beginning of the new century he stopped going to the parish café and tried to organize national competitions sponsored by social clubs.And it was during this period that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour came. At that time, his knees were necrotic and he was not yet a child photographer. All the soldiers and half-soldiers knew him, because no one could beat him in a game of chess.For Dr. Juvenal Urbino, this was a miraculous acquaintance, because at that time he was irresistibly fascinated by chess, and there were few opponents who could satisfy him.

Thanks to the doctor, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour is part of the team here.Dr. Juvenal Urbino became his unconditional protector and guarantor of everything, without even inquiring into who he was, what he was doing, what kind of scandal he was in. In the war, he was left in such a crippled and bewildered state.In the end, the doctor lent him money to open a photo studio, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, since taking pictures of the first child startled by the flash of a spotlight, has been weaving ropes. Cleared to the last penny.

All because of chess.At first, they played from seven o'clock after dinner, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was obviously better at chess, so he gave the doctor a few moves reasonably.But let less and less, until the last step not to give.Later, when Galileo da Conte opened the first movie theater, Jeremiah de Sant-Amour became one of the most punctual audiences there, and the game between the two was squeezed into nights without movie premieres .At that time, he had become a close friend of the doctor, and the doctor even willingly accompanied him to the movies.But the doctor never took his wife, partly because she had no patience to follow the complicated plot threads, and partly because he could sense, with nothing but his keen sense of smell, that Jeremiah de Saint Amor is by no means a good partner.

The only departure from the usual schedule is Sunday.He would go to church for high mass, then come home and spend the day resting and reading on the patio in the yard.He seldom visited the doctor on the Sabbath, except in extreme emergencies, and, for many years, he ceased to socialize on the Sabbath unless absolutely necessary.But on this Pentecost, by accident and coincidence, two rare events came together: the death of a friend and the 25th anniversary of his favorite student as a doctor.However, instead of signing Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's death certificate and going straight home, as he had expected, he let his curiosity drive him.

As soon as he got into the carriage, he couldn't wait to read the suicide note again.Then he ordered the coachman to take him to a remote address in the old slave district.This decision was so different from his usual habits that the coachman had to check whether he had heard it wrong.It was true: the address was clear, and the person who wrote it down had every reason to be familiar with it.Dr. Urbino turned back to the first page of the suicide note, and once again immersed himself in the unbearable secret past revealed in the letter.If he could convince himself that these were not the ramblings of a dying man, life might change, even at this age.

The sky has not been in a good mood since early in the morning, overcast and cool, but fortunately there is no danger of rain before noon.The coachman tried a shortcut, turning into the rough cobbled roads of the colonial city.On several occasions, they had to stop the car to keep the horses from being startled, as students and religious groups returning from Pentecost celebrations caused chaos.The streets were filled with paper garlands, music and flowers, and girls with colorful parasols and ruffled tulle dresses watched from balconies.In Cathedral Square, the statue of the Liberator is almost unrecognizable amid African palm trees and new spherical streetlights.The exits of the church were jammed with cars, and there was not a single vacant seat in the solemn but noisy Parish Café.The only carriage there belonged to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, and it was clearly different from the few remaining carriages in the city: its patent leather roof was always shiny, and its handles and other decorations were also different. They were all made of copper to prevent them from being corroded by nitrate, and the wheels and shafts were painted red and trimmed with gold, as if they were attending a costumed performance at the Vienna Opera House.Besides, at a time when even the most bumbling families allowed drivers to wear clean shirts, he still required his drivers to wear limp velvet uniforms and circus tamer hats Not only does this approach feel out of fashion, but it also seems especially unsympathetic during the sweltering Caribbean summer season.

For all his devotion to the city, and despite his knowledge of it better than anyone else, Dr. Juvenal Urbino rarely had the opportunity to be here with the same impunity as he did on that Sunday. Exploring the noisy old slave quarters.The coachman went around many times and inquired again and again before he found the address.Dr. Urbino finally had a close sense of the gloom and horror of the swamp, its ominous silence, and the suffocating stench that had wafted into the room during countless sleepless mornings, mixed with the scent of jasmine flowers in the courtyard. His bedroom, but he always felt that it was as fleeting as a gust of wind yesterday, and had nothing to do with his life.However, as the carriage bumped in the mud of the street and a few vultures scrambled for the remains of the slaughterhouse engulfed in seawater, the stench that had so many times been glorified by his nostalgia became an unbearable reality.Unlike the stone houses in the Governor's District, the houses here are made of faded rotten wood and zinc roofs, and most of them are built on wooden piles to prevent the smelly water from the open sewers left by the Spaniards from overflowing. Come inside.All was bleak and hopeless, but from the squalid taverns there was a deafening drumbeat, a carnival of the poor, with neither God nor the commandments of Pentecost[2] .When they finally found their place, the carriage was followed by a group of naked children, who laughed at the driver's theatrical attire until he had to frighten them away with a whip.Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who had planned to pay a private visit, realized now, too late, that there is no naivete more dangerous than that of his age.

It was a numberless house, and outwardly there was nothing to distinguish it from other, more dilapidated houses, except lace curtains and a door taken down from some old church.The coachman knocked on the door knocker and helped the doctor get out of the car after confirming that the address was correct.The door opened silently, and in the dark place stood a woman in mourning clothes, with a rose in her ear.This is a mulatto woman, no less than forty years old, but still tall and slender, with cold golden eyes and hair tightly attached to her head, as if wearing a cotton helmet.Dr. Urbino failed to recognize her, although he had seen her a few times in those cloudy chess games in the photographer's studio, and on one occasion even prescribed her some medicines for fever. Quinine prescription.He held out his hand to her and she took both, not so much to greet him as to help him into the house.The atmosphere in the living room is like being in an invisible wood, full of birds and flowers, full of exquisite furniture and objects, everything is in its right place.Dr. Urbino recalled without sentimentality the small antique dealer's shop at 26 rue de Montmartre in Paris on an autumn Monday in the last century.The woman sat down across from him and began talking to him in broken Castilian[3].

"Doctor, you can treat this place as your home," she said. "I didn't expect you to come so soon."

For a moment Dr. Urbino felt his intentions revealed.He looked at the woman attentively, and noticed that she was dressed in filial piety, and that she was neither humble nor overbearing in her grief.Then he understood that this visit was doomed to be in vain, since Jeremiah de Saint-Amour knew more than he did about everything mentioned and indicated in her suicide note.indeed so.She had been with him until the hours before his death, as she had been with him half her life with admiration and humble tenderness.This kind of emotion is almost no different from love, but in this sleepy provincial city where even state secrets are under the control of everyone, no one knows it.They met at a charity hospital in Port-au-Prince, where she was born and where he spent his first years in exile.She came to this city a year later than him, claiming it was a short-term visit, but both of them tacitly understood that she wanted to stay forever.She cleans and tidies up his studio once a week, but even the most speculative neighbors confuse appearance with reality, because they, like everyone else, think that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's disability is more than just is unable to walk.Even Dr. Urbino made such speculations from a medical point of view.The doctor would never have believed that he had a woman had it not been for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's own confession in his letters.But in any case, it was still difficult for him to understand that two free adults without the burden of the past, and outside the prejudices of this closed society, chose such an erratic way like those forbidden loves."He likes that," she explains. And the fact that she shared this secret love affair with a man who was never quite hers, and that both of them enjoyed the sudden bursts of joy more than once, is something in She does not seem to be an unacceptable way, on the contrary: life has shown her that it may be a model.

They also went to the cinema the night before, paying their own bills and having separate seats.They'd been going like this at least twice a month since that Italian immigrant, Galileo da Conte, had built an open-air cinema on the ruins of a seventeenth-century monastery.That night they watched All Quiet on the Western Front, a film adaptation of the popular novel of the previous year, which Dr. Urbino had also read and mourned the brutality of war.Later, when they rendezvoused in the studio, she found him preoccupied with a sense of loss, which she attributed to the film's brutal scene of wounded soldiers dying in the mud.She invites him to play chess to distract him.In order to make her happy, he agreed, but played absent-mindedly. Of course, he still used Baizi.In the end, he realized before her that he was about to lose in four steps, so he surrendered shamelessly.Only then did the doctor understand that she was playing against her in the last chess game, not General Jerónimo Argote as he had guessed earlier.He muttered in surprise:
"That game of chess was really well played!"

She insisted that it was not her fault, but that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, dazed by the fog of death, moved the pieces without love.It was about a quarter past eleven when the game was interrupted, for the music of the public dance had ceased.He begged her to leave him alone.He wanted to write a letter to Dr. Juvenal Urbino.He had always regarded the doctor as the most respectable person he had ever known, and, as he often said, although it was nothing more than a hobby of chess that connected the two, the doctor was his real friend.For him and the doctor, playing chess is not so much a science as a rational dialogue.Then she knew that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was on the verge of liberation, that all that remained of his life was time to write a letter.The doctor couldn't believe it.

"So you already knew!" he exclaimed.

She testified that she had not only known, but had helped him to share this dying pain with the same love that she had helped him discover happiness.Because that's what the last eleven months of his life were like: a brutal death throes.

"It should be your duty to inform everyone of this," said the doctor.

"I can't do that," she said, a little shocked, "I love him so much."

Dr. Urbino thought he had heard everything, but he had never heard anyone say such a thing, and he said it so frankly.He stared at her intently, trying to engrave this moment in his mind: she was like a statue of a river god, with eyes like snakes, fearlessly wrapped in black, with roses in her ears.Long ago, on a deserted beach in Haiti, as they lay naked after making love, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour suddenly exclaimed: "I will never grow old." It was understood as his heroic determination to fight the ravages of time, but then he said it more clearly and bluntly: he decided to end his life at the age of 60.

In fact, he just turned sixty on January 23 of this year.So he made the deadline the night before Pentecost, the biggest festival for a city that dedicated itself to the Holy Spirit.There was not a single detail of what happened last night that she didn't know in advance.They talked about it often, and shared the pain of the passage of time, but neither he nor she could stop the irreversible torrent of time.Jeremiah de Saint-Amour loved life with a meaningless passion, he loved the sea, he loved love, he loved his dog, and he loved her.As the time of his death approached, he succumbed more and more to despair, as if his death had not been his own decision in the first place, but a merciless fate.

"Last night, when I left him there alone, he wasn't of this world."

She thought about taking the dog away, but he saw it dozing on the crutch, stroked it a few times with his fingertips, and said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Woodrow Wilson has to stay with me." When writing the letter, she was told to tie the dog to the foot of the camp bed, but she fastened a slip so the dog could untie it by itself.This was her only infidelity to him, but it was justifiable, because she hoped to remember the dog's master in the cold eyes of the dog in the future.Dr. Urbino interrupted her to tell her that the dog did not break free in the end.She said: "That's why it doesn't want to." Then she was happy again, because she would rather commemorate the dead lover as he asked. with a glance, say:
"Remember me with a rose."

It was just past midnight when she got home.She lay naked on the bed and smoked, and kept lighting another cigarette with the butt to give him enough time to write the letter, which she knew must be a long and difficult letter.Just before three o'clock, when the dogs on the street started barking, she put the coffee water on the stove, changed into mourning clothes from top to bottom, and cut the first roses that bloomed in the morning in the yard.Dr. Urbino had long since realized how much he loathed the memory of this hopeless woman, and he thought he had his own reasons: only those who have no principles can find satisfaction in pain.

Before the visit was over, she told the doctor many more things.She will not go to the funeral because she has promised her lover, although Dr. Urbino believes that there is a passage in the letter that means the opposite.She will not shed a tear, waste the rest of her life in a simmering maggot broth of memories, bury herself alive between four walls, and spend her days sewing a shroud for herself, even though it is The locals are happy to see what the widow does.She planned to sell the house of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour: according to the arrangement in the will, the house and everything in it belonged to her from now on.After that, she will continue to live in this tomb of the poor waiting to die as before, without complaint or regret, because here, she has experienced happiness.

The words kept ringing in Dr. Juvenal Urbino's ears all the way home: "the grave of the poor waiting to die." This assessment was by no means idle.Because this city, his city, is still on the edge of the times: it is still the same hot and dry city, and the nights are still full of things that make him feel terrible, but at the same time, it is still exciting. Feel the lonely joy of adolescence.Here flowers rust and salt rots.For four centuries, nothing has happened here but aging among dead laurel trees and fetid swamps.In winter, sudden, sweeping rainstorms flood toilets and turn streets into sickening bogs.In summer, there is a kind of invisible dust, as rough as red-hot chalk powder, which will seep into the house from every crack when blown by a strong wind, no matter how tightly blocked it is, it will not help.In addition, high winds can lift roofs off and throw children into the air.On Saturdays, the mulatto poor people would leave their huts built of cardboard and zinc-copper alloy panels on the edge of the swamp in a disorderly manner, bring their livestock and household items for food and water, and swarm happily to occupy the rocky beach in the colonial area.Until a few years ago, some of the older men wore the actual mark of slavery, stamped on the chest with a red-hot iron.All weekend, the men danced without restraint, got themselves desperately drunk on home-distilled liquor, and had sex among plum bushes.And in the middle of the night on Sunday, they end their fandango with a bloody group fight.On the other days of the week, this group of rambunctious people mingled in the squares and streets of the old city, setting up small stalls and doing various businesses, injecting a flavor of fried fish into this dead city. The Restlessness of Tasteful Bazaar: A New Life.

Independence first from Spanish rule and the abolition of slavery hastened the decline of the aristocracy, and it was in this environment that Dr. Juvenal Urbino was born and brought up.The once-prominent family fell silent in their unguarded castle.The rough streets paved with stone bricks were once so effective against sudden wars and pirates who landed, but now, weeds hang down from the balconies along the streets, and the lime and stone walls are cracked. Even the best mansions are not immune to decay.At two o'clock in the afternoon, the only sign of anger was the listless sound of piano practice in the dimness of the lunch break.Inside the mansion, where the cool bedrooms smelled of incense, the women hid from the sun as if from some disgusting contagion, and even at early morning mass they covered their faces with veils.Their love is slow and difficult, often disturbed by ominous omens, and life seems endless to them.In the evening, the streets were full of traffic, and a large group of bloodthirsty mosquitoes flew up from the swamp, carrying a soft smell of human feces, warm and sentimental, disturbing the firm belief in death in the depths of the soul.

The so-called unique life of this colonial city was therefore only an illusion of memory, which the young Doctor Juvenal Urbino always glorified in his sorrows in Paris.In the eighteenth century, the city's commerce flourished the most in the Caribbean, not least because of the unsavory but unique advantage of being the largest African slave market in the Americas.In addition, it is the permanent residence of the Governor of the Kingdom of New Granada.Viceroys prefer to be here, ruling facing the ocean, rather than in a distant and freezing capital, where constant rain can disturb their perception of reality.During the city's glory days, fleets of galleons laden with wealth from all over Potosi, Quito and Veracruz gathered in this bay several times a year.On Friday, June 5000, [-], at four o'clock in the afternoon, the galleon San Jose, carrying precious stones and precious metals worth [-] billion pesos at the time, was sunk by the British fleet in the harbor as soon as it sailed to Cadiz. It has not been salvaged after two long centuries.This batch of treasures lying in the coral, together with the body of the captain floating sideways in the cockpit, is often mentioned by historians as a symbol of this city submerged in memory.

On the other side of the harbour, in the residential area of ​​La Manga, lies the home of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, and everything here seems to belong to another era.It was a large, cool, one-story house with a Doric colonnade on the outside terrace, from which one could look out over the foul waters and shipwrecks of the bay.From the entrance to the kitchen, there is a chessboard pattern of black and white floor tiles - people have more than once attributed it to Dr. Urbino's personal preference, but forget that it is also the work of Catalan master builders. It is a common problem, and at the beginning of this century, the houses of the nouveau riche in this area were all built by them.The hall was spacious, with high ceilings like all the other rooms, and six French windows facing the street.The hall and the kitchen are separated by a huge glass door with intricate decorations, with vine branches and bunches of grapes carved on it. In the copper grove, several girls are intoxicated by the sound of the faun's flute .All the furniture in the main drawing room, with the pendulum clock in the hall that looked like a living sentry, was authentic English late nineteenth century.Chandeliers are adorned with crystal pendants, and Sèvres vases, vases, and alabaster pagan figurines of eroticism abound.That European style is lost in the rest of the house, though, spaces that mix rattan armchairs, Viennese rockers and locally handcrafted leather stools.In addition to the bed, there is an exquisite San Jacinto hammock in the bedroom, with the owner's name embroidered with silk thread, Gothic font, and colorful tassels hanging on both sides.One side of the dining room was originally designed to hold luxurious dinners, and later turned into a small concert hall. Whenever famous performers come here, they will be invited to hold private concerts here.The floor tiles are covered with Turkish rugs bought from the Paris World Expo, in order to make the environment more peaceful.Next to the neatly arranged record racks is a new record player.In the corner stood a piano covered with a manila shawl, which Dr. Urbino had not played for many years.Throughout the house, the shrewdness and care of a down-to-earth woman can be seen everywhere.

However, no place can be as solemn and solemn as the study room.It had been Dr. Urbino's sanctuary there before old age took him captive.Around his father's walnut writing desk and leather-upholstered easy chair, he had the walls and windows blocked by glazed shelves, and then, in an order that was almost insane, he fixed them up. Three thousand volumes are neatly stacked, each volume is framed in calfskin, and the initials of the title are printed in gold letters on the spine.The other rooms have to endure the noise of the port and all kinds of unpleasant smells, but the study is completely opposite, always filled with the quiet atmosphere of the monastery.People in the Caribbean have a superstition that opening doors and windows will bring into the house a coolness that is not actually there.Dr. Urbino and his wife, who were born and raised here, were at first oppressed by the closed doors and windows, but in the end, they adopted the Romans' wonderful way to resist the heat, that is, in the fainting Sleeping in August, the doors and windows were closed tightly to prevent the hot air from the street from entering, and they were opened at night to let the cool breeze enter the house.Since then, their home has been the coolest place under the scorching sun in La Manga.It was a treat to take a nap in the twilight of the bedroom, then sit on the porch in the afternoon and watch the heavy gray freighters and riverboats with wooden paddle wheels come and go from New Orleans.At dusk, the riverboats will be brightly lit and, accompanied by rumbling roars, will sweep away the garbage deposited in the bay.From December to March every year, the northern trade winds will wantonly blow off the roof, and at night, they howl and circle around the house like a pack of hungry wolves, looking for gaps to sneak in.At such times, the doctor's home is also the best protected.It never occurred to anyone that a couple living in such a solid and solid house would have any reason to be unhappy.

But in any case, when Dr. Urbino got home just before ten o'clock that morning, he was not happy.The two visits disturbed him not just because he missed Pentecost Mass, but at an age when everything seemed to be settled, they threatened to turn him into someone else.He was trying to get some sleep before Dr. Racides Oliveria's lavish luncheon, but he caught up with the servants chaotically chasing parrots.The parrot flew to the tallest branch of the mango tree while they were taking it out of the cage and trimming the feathers on its wings.This is a parrot with sparse feathers and eccentric temperament. When others ask it to speak, it refuses to speak, but when people least expect it, it talks endlessly, and expresses it very clearly. They are rare to see.It had been trained by Dr. Urbino himself, which gave him privileges that no one in the family, not even the doctor's children, had enjoyed as children.

It has been in this family for more than 20 years, but no one knows how many years it lived before that.Every afternoon when he wakes up from his nap, Dr. Urbino sits with him, sitting on the patio in the yard, the coolest place in the house.With the zeal of an educator, the doctor trained with the most arduous means until the parrot could speak French as well as a scholar.Later, out of pure love for virtue, he taught the parrot the accompaniment of the Latin Mass and a few passages from the Gospel of Matthew [4], and even tried to mechanically instill in it the four algorithms, It's a pity that it didn't work out in the end.On one of his last trips to Europe, he brought back the city's first phonograph with a horn, along with many popular records and those of his favorite classical composers.In the next few months, day after day, he let the parrot listen to the songs of Yvette Gilbert and Aristide Brion, which were all the rage in the last century, until the parrot finally memorized them all. down.Sing the song of the lady singer, it sang in a woman's voice, sang the song of the male singer, it sang in tenor, and ended with a wild laugh, and the maids heard it sing in French The laughter that erupted after the song was exactly the same, vivid.This parrot is famous far and wide, and some distinguished guests who come from the inland by riverboat often ask to see it.At that time, many British tourists passed by here on a boat transporting bananas from New Orleans.At one point, some Brits even tried to buy it at any price.However, the parrot's crowning moment was the day when the President of the Republic, Marco Fidel Suarez, brought his entire cabinet of ministers to the residence to testify to its reputation.They arrived about three o'clock in the afternoon, all wearing top hats and woolen frock coats, and they were all panting from the heat.For three days, they had been meeting formally, never taking off their attire under the blazing August sky.But in the end, they had to come with curiosity and go back with curiosity, because during the two hours of desperate waiting, no matter how much Dr. Urbino pleaded or threatened, the parrot never said a word, as if Saying "the mouth grows in me", but even this sentence will never be said.The doctor made a fool of himself in public, and it was only his fault that he did not listen to his wife's wise reminder and insisted on sending out this reckless invitation.

It is a testament to its sanctity that the parrot has retained its privilege in the family after that historic act of disrespect.No animals were allowed in the home except him and a tortoise.The tortoise had disappeared for three or four years, and everyone thought it was lost forever, but it reappeared in the kitchen.However, it is not considered a living thing, but more like a mineral, a talisman that brings good luck, and no one has ever been able to say where it lives.Dr. Urbino refused to admit that he hated animals, but instead covered it up with various invented scientific or philosophical excuses.These reasons can always convince many people, except his wife.He used to say that people who love animals too much can do the most cruel things to humans themselves.Dogs are not loyal, but servile; cats are opportunists and traitors; peacocks are the heralds of death; macaws are merely annoying ornaments; rabbits encourage greed; Damn it, for it was it that caused Christ to be denied three times[5].

In contrast, his wife, Fermina Daza, was a blind lover of tropical flowers and domesticated animals.She is now 72 years old, and she has long lost the figure of a young doe.When she was first married, she took advantage of the freshness of their love and kept many animals in the house, far beyond the scope of reason.The first to be raised were three Dalmatians, named after three Roman emperors.In order to compete for favor in front of a bitch, they bite you to death.And the bitch named Messalina[6] lived up to her name, and she had just given birth to nine puppies, and quickly became pregnant with ten more.After that, Fermina Daza kept several Abyssinian cats with eagle silhouette and pharaonic style, several squint-eyed Siamese cats and court Persian cats with orange eyes.They stalked from bedroom to bedroom like ghostly shadows.In rut, howls from their demon gatherings disturb the calm of the night.For several years, on the mango tree in the yard, there was actually an Amazon long-tailed monkey tied to the waist by an iron chain. Because of its painful face, innocent eyes and extremely rich body language, it resembled Archbishop Obduli O-Ray often arouses some kind of sympathy from people.But it was not because of these that Fermina Daza abandoned it in the end, but because of its bad habit of courting women and complacency.

All kinds of Guatemalan birds are kept in the birdcages in the corridor. In addition, there are several stone plovers who do not know the prophet, several marsh herons with long yellow legs, and a bird that often pokes in from the window to nibble on the vase. flamingo fawn.Shortly before the last civil war broke out, when there were first rumors that the Pope might be here, they brought a bird of paradise from Guatemala.But when it was learned that the rumors of the pope's visit were nothing more than rumors spread by the government to intimidate the Liberals who were planning to do evil, the bird was sent back to its native land, and it went faster than it came.On another occasion, they bought back six sweet crows in a gold-wire cage from a smuggler's galleon in Curacao, exactly like the ones that Fermina Daza had kept at her father's house since she was a child, She hopes to continue raising this bird after she gets married.But they kept flapping their wings, filling the house with their funeral-wreath smell, which no one could stand.They also brought back a four-meter boa constrictor to scare off bats, salamanders, and various pests that invaded the home during the rainy season with its breath of death.Although the goal was achieved, the chichi breathing of the sleepless hunter disturbed the tranquility in the darkness of the bedroom.Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who at the time was busy with professional ethics and absorbed in social and cultural affairs, although he was among such a disgusting mass of living things, just think about it. His wife was not only the most beautiful in the Caribbean, but also the happiest, and he was content.However, one rainy afternoon, exhausted from a long day at work, he returns home to a disaster that thrusts him back to reality.From the living room as far as he could see, the corpses of animals were strewn together, floating in pools of blood.The maids all climbed onto the chairs, their faces full of bewilderment, obviously, they were still in shock from the massacre.

The thing is like this: one of the several German mastiffs suddenly got rabies, went crazy, and rushed to bite no matter what animal it saw, and finally the neighbor's gardener stepped forward and chopped it into pieces with a knife.No one knew which animals it had bitten, or which green foam it spit out had been contaminated, so Dr. Urbino ordered all surviving animals to be killed and the carcasses taken to a remote wilderness to be burned. We also asked the staff of Ren'ai Hospital to conduct a thorough disinfection at home.The only one who survived was the good-luck male American tortoise, because no one thought about him.

For the first time Fermina Daza fully agreed with her husband in family matters and for a long time was careful not to mention animals again.She consoled herself with the colorful illustrations in Linnaeus's Natural History, which she had framed and hung on the hall wall.If some thieves hadn't broken the bathroom window one morning and stole a set of silver tableware from five generations of her family, she might have given up thinking that she would never see animals in her home again.Dr. Juvenal Urbino installed double locks on the iron rings on the windows, bolted the doors, put his most valuable objects in safes, and developed a sort of belated wartime Habit: Sleep with a revolver under your pillow.But he objected to buying another greyhound, vaccinated or not, free-range or on a leash: even if thieves were to steal the house, he would never agree.

"Anyone who can't speak is not allowed to enter this house."

He said this to keep his wife from bothering about this matter, because she stubbornly wanted to buy a dog back, but he never imagined that this sentence that he said in a hurry and had too broad a meaning would kill him one day .Fermina Dassana's rebellious personality had subtly changed with age, and she immediately caught her husband's flippant omissions: a few months after the theft, she went to another ship from Sailing in Curacao, buying a Paramaribo royal parrot.Although it can only speak some sailor's vulgar words, it is exactly like a real person, and it is worth the high price of twelve lives.

This parrot is indeed a good breed, and it is more dexterous than it looks. The only difference in appearance from the tropical jungle parrot is that it has a yellow head and a black tongue, but even with turpentine suppositories, the jungle parrot cannot learn to speak.Dr. Urbino, always a man who could afford to lose, bowed his head before his wife's wit and was surprised to find that he, too, found the parrot's progress amid the laughter of the maids amusing.This drenched parrot was especially cheerful on a rainy afternoon, letting go of his tongue and spouting old sayings he couldn't possibly have learned in this family, making him seem much older than he looked .Dr. Urbino's last reservation was finally completely disintegrated one night.That night, several thieves tried to sneak into the house again through the skylight of the roof terrace, but the parrot scared them away with a few wild barks of German mastiffs. Even a real dog could not bark more realistically. Shouting, and shouting "There is a thief" and "There is a thief", these two interesting life-saving skills were not learned in this family.Since then, Dr. Urbino has taken over it himself.He ordered a perch to be built under the mango tree, with two containers on it, one for water and one for ripe bananas, and a hanging pole for the parrots to practice juggling.Although Dr. Urbino suspects that its chronic melioidosis is harmful to the normal breathing of man, from December to March, when the nights turn cool and the north wind makes it impossible for the parrot to stay outside, it will It will be put into a cage covered with a blanket and taken to the bedroom to sleep.Over the years, they have always clipped the feathers of its wings and let it walk freely with the old knight's steps, with bent legs.But one day, he was juggling happily on the beam of the kitchen, but he fell into the pot of chowder all of a sudden, uttering his squeaking sailor's cries for help.Fortunately, it was lucky enough that the cook scooped it up with a large cooking spoon.It was burned red all over and lost all its feathers, but it was still alive.Since then, it has been kept in a cage even in broad daylight, disregarding the folklore that parrots in cages forget what they have learned, and only at four o'clock in the cool, Dr. It will only be released when the terrace of the yard teaches it lessons.No one noticed in time that the feathers on its wings were too long, and that morning, when they were preparing to trim it, it escaped to the top of the mango tree.

It took them three hours to catch it.The maids, with the help of the neighbor's maid, tried everything to coax him down, but he stayed where he was, laughing loudly and shouting, "Long live the Liberals! Long live the bloody Liberals!" ' Lately no less than four jovial drunks have lost their lives to such reckless callsigns.Dr. Urbino could barely see the parrot among the leaves, and he tried to convince it in Spanish, French, and even Latin, and it answered him in the same language, with the same accent, and with the same timbre, but always Stay close to the treetops.Seeing that no one could get the parrot down willingly, Dr. Urbino ordered the help of the firemen, his latest invention of a patriotic citizen.

In fact, until recently, fires were put out by spontaneous people with mason's ladders and buckets of water brought in from nowhere.That chaotic approach can sometimes do more harm than the fire itself.And since last year, thanks to a fundraiser initiated by the Public Improvement Association, of which Dr. Juvenal Urbino is honorary chairman, there has been a professional fire brigade, plus a car with siren and siren. and two water storage trucks for high-pressure water pipes.The stuff was such a hit that schools would shut down every time the church bells sounded the siren so the students could go and watch the firefighters put out the fire.At first, their only task was to put out fires.But Dr. Urbino told the municipality that he had seen firefighters in Hamburg resuscitating a child frozen in a cellar after three days of snow, and in an alley in Naples from the tenth floor. The coffin containing the dead was lifted from the balcony of the building, but the family of the deceased could not carry the coffin to the street because the stairs of that building were too tortuous.In this way, local firefighters began to learn to provide other emergency services, such as picking door locks, killing poisonous snakes, etc., and the medical school also opened a small accident first aid course for them.Therefore, it is not too much to ask them to help catch a parrot as dignified as a gentleman from a tree."Tell them I invited them," said Dr. Urbino, and went straight to the bedroom to change for the luncheon.In fact, at this moment, he was too dazed by Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's letter to think about the fate of the parrot.

Fermina Daza wore a loose silk blouse that reached to her hips, a genuine long pearl necklace wrapped six times around her neck, and a pair of satin high-heeled shoes. It was worn on very solemn occasions, for her age did not allow her to go to so much trouble to dress up so often.The fashionable attire seemed ill-suited to a respectable old lady, but it was perfectly appropriate for her.She has a slender frame, and her figure is still slender and straight. There is not even a single age spot on her elastic hands, and her short hair that is close to her cheeks has a steely blue light.Compared with the photos of her newlyweds, the only things she can maintain at this moment are those clear almond-shaped eyes and the unique arrogance of her nation, but what she loses due to age, she makes up for with her personality , and won more because of hard work.She thinks it's good now: Gone are the days of wire corsets, cinched waists, and padded hips.The body is liberated, the breathing becomes smoother, and what is originally expressed is what it is.Although she is 72 years old.

Dr. Urbino saw her sitting in front of the dressing table, under the slowly turning blades of the electric fan, putting on her head a bell hat decorated with violet felt flowers.The bedroom is spacious and bright, with a rose-colored knitted mosquito net hanging on the English-style bed, and two open windows facing several trees in the yard.The cicadas were disturbed by the sign of impending rain and panicked, and piercing chirping bursts came into the house.Since returning from the wedding trip, Fermina Daza has been choosing the right clothes for her husband according to the weather and the occasion, and putting them neatly on the chair the night before so that when he comes out of the bathroom Easy to put on.She also couldn't remember when she started helping him dress, and then changed to completely dressing him.She knew very well that at first she did it out of love, but since five years ago she had to do it anyway, because he could no longer dress himself.The two had just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and neither could live without the other for even a single moment, or even think about the other, and that became more and more the case with age.But neither he nor she can tell whether this interdependence is based on love or out of habit.They never asked themselves that, because both would rather not know the answer.She had been aware of her husband's growing faltering steps, his mood swings, the gaps in his memory, and his recent habit of sobbing in his sleep, but she did not take these as sure signs of his final age, but rather It is regarded as a happy rejuvenation.She sees him as an old child, not a difficult old man.This self-deception may have been a blessing for both men, since it kept them from sympathizing with each other.

Perhaps their lives would have been different if they had understood in time that the daily annoyances were more inescapable than the catastrophes of marriage.And if they have learned anything in their common life, it is that wisdom often comes to us when it is useless.For many years, Fermina Daza had painfully endured the joy of her husband's early morning waking.She clung to the last of her drowsiness lest she face what a new, ominous morning would herald, while he awoke with the innocence of a newborn: a new morning meant He has earned another day.She heard him wake up to the crowing of the cock, and the first sign of being alive was a cough for no reason, as if deliberately waking her up.She listened to him fumbling for the slippers that were supposed to be by the bed, and grumbling and whining for the sole purpose of disturbing her.She heard him stumbling all the way to the bathroom in the dark, and then he would stay in the study for an hour, but she had just fallen asleep again when she heard him come back to get dressed, still without turning on the light. (Once, during a salon game, he was asked how he defined himself, and he said, "I'm a man who dresses in the dark.") As she listened to him, she knew that none of those noises were necessary.He pretended to be unintentional, but in fact he deliberately made all these movements, just like she was clearly awake but pretended not to be awake.His reason was clear: never before had he needed her, alive and clear-headed, more than in these disturbing moments.

No one sleeps more gracefully than her, one hand resting on her forehead like a sketch of a dance.However, if someone disturbs her light sleepiness when she is about to wake up, she will be more fierce than anyone else.Dr. Urbino knew that she was waiting for the slightest movement from him, and would even thank him for it, so that she could blame him for being woken up at five o'clock in the morning. .And so it was, and a few times, when he was groping in the dark because he hadn't found the slippers in the usual place, she suddenly said in a half-dream voice, "You left them in the bathroom last night." An angry and sober voice cursed:

"The most unlucky thing in this family is that people never sleep well."

So she tossed and turned in bed, turned on the light without mercy to herself, and exalted herself at the first victory of the day.It is, in fact, a game between two people, mysterious and sinister, but also because of this they can reinvigorate: it is one of the many dangerous pleasures of domestic love.However, it was a daily pastime like this that almost brought their first 30 years of living together to an end.It all started when, one day, they ran out of soap in the bathroom.

Everything is the same as usual.Dr. Juvenal Urbino returned from the bathroom to his bedroom, where he could bathe himself without help.He began to dress without turning on the light.She was the same as usual at this time, lying in the warm blanket like a fetus, her eyes were closed, her breathing was very light, and the arm dancing the sacred dance was placed on top of her head.She was half asleep, and he knew it very well.After the starched linen clothes rustled for a while in the dark, Dr. Urbino said to himself:
"It's been almost a week without soap in my shower."

So she remembered it, woke up, and rolled over angrily at the world, because she had indeed forgotten to put fresh soap in the bathroom.She found out about it three days ago when she was standing under the shower head and thought about putting it on later, but then forgot and didn't remember until the next day in the shower.And the same thing happened on the third day.It hadn't been a week, and he said that to exaggerate her error, but three days were there and unforgivable.The feeling of being caught wrong on the spot made her angry from embarrassment.As usual, she plays offense as defense.

"I've been showering every day these days," she exclaimed in a gaffe, "and there's always soap."

Although he knew her tactics all too well, this time he couldn't take it anymore.He made up a high-sounding reason and moved to the intern doctor's dormitory of Ren'ai Hospital, and only went home to change clothes before the evening visit.And whenever she heard the sound of his coming back, she ran to the kitchen, pretending to be busy, until the tramp of carriages sounded again in the street.For the next three months, every time they tried to work out their differences, they only managed to fuel their anger.As long as she didn't admit that there was no soap in the bathroom, he wasn't going to come back, and as long as she didn't admit that he had lied on purpose to torture her, she wasn't going to accept him back.

Of course, this incident also gave them the opportunity to conjure up countless altercations that had occurred on countless other hazy mornings.One revulsion begets another, old wounds are uncovered and become new wounds.Both were horrified as they painfully confirmed that all they had done during all these years of marital feuding was to foster animosity.He even suggested that if necessary, they could go to the archbishop to make a public confession, and let God judge whether there is soap in the soap box in the bathroom.At this moment, she, who had kept her sanity well, finally burst into a historic cry:

"To hell with Monsieur the Archbishop!"

The insult shook the city's foundations, sparked all sorts of unresolved gossip, and became folk slang like a rap line: "To hell with Mr. Archbishop!" She realized she had crossed the line , so preemptively, before she expected her husband's reaction, threatened him that she would move to her father's old house by herself. Although it was rented out and became a public office, it still belonged to her. .This is no bluff: she really wants to go, regardless of public opinion.And her husband found out just in time.He did not have the courage to challenge this biased judgment, so he backed down.Of course, he did not admit that there was soap in the bathroom, because that would be an insult to the truth, but just accepted that the two continued to live in the same house, but in separate rooms, and did not speak to each other.So at mealtimes, in order to avoid embarrassment, they tactfully pass messages from one end of the table to the other through the children, and the children never realize that they never talk to each other.

There was no bathroom in the study, which, on the contrary, avoided the friction caused by the morning noises, because Dr. Urbino went in to take a bath after preparing lessons instead, and was careful not to wake his wife.Several times, they bumped into each other before going to bed, and they took turns brushing their teeth.One day after four months, she came out of the bathroom and found him reading a book on their big bed (this is a common thing) and fell asleep.She lay down beside him, making great movements, hoping to wake him up and make him go away.And he did wake up in a daze, but he didn't get up, but turned off the bedside lamp, and then fell comfortably on his pillow.She shook his shoulders, reminding him that it was time to go to the study, but at this moment, he was back on the ancestral feather bed again, feeling so comfortable that he would rather surrender.

"Let me stay here," he said. "There is soap."

When they entered old age and recalled this past, neither he nor she could believe the amazing fact that that quarrel was the most serious and the only one in their half century of common life. The idea of ​​giving up came up, hoping to start another life.Although they are old and at peace now, they are careful not to mention it, because the newly healed wound will bleed again, as if it happened yesterday.

He was the first man who made Fermina Daza hear the sound of urinating.It was the wedding night, in the cabin of the ship that was carrying them to France.She was languishing from seasickness, and the sound of his stallion urinating was so powerful and majestic that it added to her horror of the catastrophe that had always haunted her.The sound of his spring water had diminished with age, but the memory came back to her frequently, because she could never stand him getting the edge of the pool wet when he used the toilet.Dr. Urbino tried to convince her with a plain truth that anyone who would listen could understand, telling her that such accidents were not caused by his daily carelessness, as she insisted, but were caused by bodily functions. Reason: As a young man, he peed straight and straight, and in school he was a champion of peeing at a bottle, but as the years wore on, not only did the pee lessen, but it also went crooked, branching off into many tributaries, and eventually Becomes an unruly fountain of illusion, despite his best efforts to keep it straight each time."The flush toilet must have been invented by someone who knew nothing about men," he said. He had to contribute to domestic peace by his daily actions, but more out of humiliation than humility: After urinating, he used toilet paper to dry the edge of the toilet bowl.She knows it all too well, but she never says anything as long as the ammonia smell in the bathroom isn't too noticeable, and when it does, she proclaims as if she's discovered a crime: "The smell here Choking like a rabbit hole." On the eve of old age, Dr. Urbino finally found the ultimate solution to this physical obstacle: pee sitting like her, so that not only keeps the toilet The cleanliness of the pool and his own posture are much more comfortable.

By then, his self-care skills were so poor that a slip and fall in the bathroom could be fatal, so he was vigilantly against showering.Their home was modern, without the pewter tubs with lion legs that were common in old town homes.At first, he rejected it on hygienic grounds: he thought the bathtub was one of the dirtiest inventions of the Europeans, who bathed only on the last Friday of every month, and then soaked themselves in a vat of sewage, filled with All the filth they've worked so hard to get off their bodies.So he had an extra-large barrel made of solid guaiac wood.And Fermina Daza used this bucket to bathe her husband in accordance with the procedures for bathing newborns.Each bath lasted more than an hour, and the water was mixed with a soup boiled with mallow and orange peel, which had a very calming effect on him, and sometimes he even fell asleep in the fragrant soup.After the bath, Fermina Daza helped him dress: first she sprinkled talcum powder between his legs, dabbed cocoa butter on the burnt rash, and gently put him on his drawers, as if they were A diaper, and then, from the socks to the tie with the topaz pin.At last, the couple's morning calm was restored, because he returned to the childhood that was taken away by his children, and she, finally, reconciled with the family schedule, because the years also passed on her: she slept more and more. At least, before she turned 70, she woke up earlier than her husband.

On that Sunday of Pentecost, when he lifted the blanket to see the body of Jeremiah de Sant'Amor, Dr. Juvenal Urbino found something in his glorious career as a doctor and a believer. Something that he has always denied in his life: even after so many years of familiarity with death, after fighting with it and being in contact with it over and over for so long, it was the first time he dared to look at it directly, and at the same time, it was also watching him.It's not the fear of death.No, it wasn't: the fear had been around since the night, many years ago, when he woke up from a nightmare and realized that death was not just an ever-present possibility, as he felt it was, but an imminent reality. In his heart, with him, like another shadow on top of his shadow.In fact, what he saw that day was a real presence, and before that, death was just a certainty of his imagination.He was relieved that the instrument used by the Almighty God to reveal this mystery to him unexpectedly was Jeremiah de Saint-Amor, whom he always believed to be a saint, but he never I don't know the grace I have received.However, the letter revealed to him his true identity, his dark past and his incredible ability to disguise, which made the doctor suddenly feel that something decisive and inescapable happened in his life. redeeming things.

However, Fermina Daza did not infect his melancholy.Of course, he also tried to infect her, when she helped him tuck his legs into his trousers, and buttoned the long row of buttons on his shirt.But he didn't succeed, because Fermina Daza was not so easily impressed, and it was just the death of a man she didn't like.She had never met Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, only that he was a cripple on crutches, on one of the many islands in the Antilles, in one of many uprisings, from the firing squad. He escaped at gunpoint, became a children's photographer because of the needs of life, and eventually became the most popular in the province; she also knew that he once won a man who she remembered as Torre Molino A game of chess, even though the man was actually called Capablanca.

"He's actually a fugitive from Cayenne who was sentenced to life in prison for a felony," Dr. Urbino said. "Can you imagine that he even ate human flesh?"

He gave her the letter, the secret of which he intended to take to the grave.But she didn't read it, but put the neatly folded letter paper into the drawer of the dressing table and locked it with a key.She had grown accustomed to her husband's unfathomable capacity for fuss, to his fuss, which had grown more intricate with age, and his narrow-mindedness, which was so at odds with his public persona.And this time, he was even worse than before.She had thought that her husband respected Jeremiah de Saint-Amour not because of who he was before, but because of what he had done since he came here with nothing but an exile's backpack , so she didn't understand why the late exposure of this person's identity made her husband so frustrated.She also didn't understand why her husband was so disgusted with the fact that he had a woman in private.It may be said to be a habit passed down from generation to generation of people like Jeremiah de Saint-Amor; besides, the husband himself has done it in some ungrateful time; besides, she felt that the woman could help him. Fulfilling the decision to die is itself a testament to heartbreaking love.She said: "If you, like him, decide to die for such serious reasons, it is my duty to do the same." Dr. Urbino was at a crossroads again, and his wife This arbitrary incomprehension had annoyed him for half a century.

"You don't understand anything," he said. "I'm not angry about who he was or what he was, but that he lied to all of us for so many years."

Instant tears began to fill his eyes, but she pretended not to see them.

"He's right," she retorted. "If he's told the truth, neither you nor that woman nor anyone here will love him as much as they once did."

She helped him fasten his pocket watch chain to the buttonhole of his vest, and gave him a final adjustment of the tie knot and topaz pin.Then, she wiped away his tears with a perfumed handkerchief, and wiped away the tears from his beard, then opened the four corners of the handkerchief, folded it into the shape of a magnolia flower, and put it in his coat pocket.At this moment, the pendulum clock struck eleven and echoed throughout the house.

"Hurry up," she said, taking his arm. "We're going to be late."

Dr. Rashides Oliveria's wife, Amita DeChamps, and their seven, one, and one witty daughter, have planned everything to make this 25th anniversary lunch the year's event. social event.His family's house is located in the very center of the historic old town, where the former mint was located, and has been transformed by a Florentine architect.The architect passed through here like an evil wind of innovation, turning no less than four seventeenth-century ruins into Venetian cathedrals.The doctor's house has six bedrooms and two halls for meeting and dining. It is very spacious and well ventilated, but it still cannot receive a large number of guests from the city, let alone a group of specially selected guests from other cities.As for the courtyard of his house, it was like a courtyard with a cloister in a monastery, with a stone fountain singing in the center.At dusk, the fragrance of balsam from the flower beds permeates the whole house.But the space under the arcade was not big enough to accommodate the dignitaries with prominent names.So they finally decided to hold the lunch at a country house, a 10-minute drive down the Royal Highway.There is a large yard of several thousand square meters, planted with tall Indian laurel trees, and native water lilies floating in the slowly flowing stream.Under the leadership of Mrs. Oliveria, the guys at the Don Sancho Restaurant set up colorful canvas awnings in places where there was no shade, and under the laurel trees they used many tables to build a long dining table, all Linen tablecloths were spread, 120 sets of tableware were placed, and a cluster of roses picked that day was also placed on the guest table.They set up a stage for the band. Among them, the wind band is only responsible for playing duet dance music and national waltz, and there is also a four-piece string band invited from the art school, which Mrs. Olivia specially prepared for her husband's respected teacher. Surprise - the luncheon will be hosted by the teacher.Even though it wasn't the doctor's actual graduation anniversary, they chose this Pentecost Sunday to highlight the festivities.

The preparation work started as early as three months ago, and I was afraid that some necessary things could not be completed due to lack of time.They sent and brought live hens from Hienaga de Oro.These chickens are famous all over the coast, not only for their large size and delicious taste, but also because during the colonial period, they foraged in the alluvial soil areas, and in their gizzards, there can be found grains of pure gold in the sand.Mrs. Olivelia, accompanied by several daughters and servants, also boarded the luxurious ocean liner herself to select the best things from all over the world to celebrate her husband's achievements.Everything was as she expected, except that the celebration was held on a Sunday in June, and the rainy season of the year came late.That morning, as she went out to high mass, she felt threatened.The humidity in the air frightened her, and then she realized that the sky was overcast and the air pressure was so low that she could not even see the horizon.Despite these ominous omens, the director of the astronomical observatory she met at Mass reminded her that in the city's troubled history, even in the harshest of winters, Pentecost never fell. over rain.However, just as the clock struck twelve o'clock, when many guests were enjoying their aperitif in the open air, a lone thunderbolt shook the ground, and a gust of wind from the sea overturned the tables and blew the tarpaulins to the ground. In the sky, catastrophic rainstorms poured down, and the sky seemed to collapse.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino finally arrived with difficulty in the confusion of the storm, with the last group of guests he met on the road.He wanted to be like those guests, stepping on stones after getting out of the car, jumping across the yard and rushing into the house, but in the end he was embarrassingly covered by a canopy of yellow canvas by Don Sancho's men Down, hugged it in with his arms.The scattered tables had been relocated indoors as perfectly as possible, and even the bedrooms were filled, without the slightest effort being made by the guests to conceal their distress.It was as hot as a ship's boiler room, for all the windows were shut to keep the rain from blowing in at an angle.When in the courtyard, there are cards with the names of the guests on every position on the table, and according to the custom, one side is for men and the other side is for women.But in the house, the name tags were mixed together, and everyone had to find a place to sit. This irresistible natural disaster caused a mixed sitting of men and women, breaking our social superstition for the first time.In this cataclysm, it was as if Aminta de Oliveria was everywhere at all times.Though her hair was drenched and her fine clothes spattered with mud, she bore the misfortune calmly, always with the invincible smile she had learned from her husband, and never let the bad luck have a moment. Proud opportunity.With the help of her daughters, forged in the same furnace as her, she relocated the table of honor as best she could, placing Dr. Juvenal Urbino in the middle, Archbishop Obdulio — Ray sat on his right.Fermina Daza sat next to her husband as usual because she was worried that he would fall asleep at lunch or spill soup on his lapel.In the seat opposite sat Dr. Rashides Oliveria.He was over half a century old, slightly feminine, and very well maintained. His lively energy was not commensurate with his superb medical skills.The rest of the main table was filled with provincial and municipal dignitaries, and there was a beauty queen from the previous year, whom the prefect took her arm and placed beside him.Although it is not customary to dress guests in the local area, let alone this is a country banquet, the women are all wearing evening dresses and full jewelry, while most of the men are wearing dark dresses and black shirts. Ties, and some even put on woolen frock coats.Only those who had seen the world wore everyday clothes, and that included Dr. Juvenal Urbino.On every seat, there is a French menu with gold rims.

Mrs. Olivelia, worried about the heat, went around the house begging her guests to take off their coats during the meal, but no one dared to do anything first.The archbishop reminded Dr. Juvenal Urbino that this was in some ways a historic luncheon: here, for the first time, both sides of the civil war that had bloodied the country since independence Heal the trauma, abandon the hatred, and sit at the same table.It's an idea that appeals to passionate Liberals, especially younger members, who have finally elected a president of their own party after 45 years of Conservative monopoly.Dr. Urbino was unimpressed: he saw no difference at all between a Liberal president and a Conservative president, except that the former was slightly less well-dressed.But he didn't want to contradict the Archbishop, though he would have pointed out to him that all the people at the luncheon were here not because of their ideas but because of their ancestry, which has always been above political turmoil and above the horrors of war.In fact, it is precisely because of this that there will be no empty seats here.

The storm stopped as suddenly as it had started.Immediately the sun was burning hot, and there was no cloud in the sky.It's just that the storm just now was too violent, several big trees were uprooted, and the flooded water turned the yard into a swamp.The biggest disasters happen in the kitchen.Several wood-burning stoves were set up out of brick in the open air in the backyard, before the cooks could salvage the pots above them from the heavy rain.It took them a while to scramble to clean out the flooded kitchen and improvise new stoves on the back porch.But by one o'clock in the afternoon, the emergency had been resolved, and only dessert was left to be served by the nuns of the Santa Clara convent, who had promised to deliver it by eleven o'clock.There was a fear that the brooks by the Royal Highway would come up again, as they do in not so cold winters, and if that were the case, there would be no possibility of dessert being delivered within two hours.As soon as the rain stopped, the windows were opened immediately, and the sulfur-cleaned air in the heavy rain was blown in, and the room suddenly became refreshing.The band was then ordered to play the waltz from the program on the porch terrace, but their only effect was to heighten the restlessness, as the sound of brass instruments echoed throughout the house and people had to shout Shout to talk.Tired of waiting and smiling on the verge of tears, Amita de Olivella ordered the food to be served immediately.

Next it was the turn of the art school band to play.In the superficial silence won for the initial melody, a piece of Mozart's "Hunting" sounded slowly.Despite the louder and noisier voices, and despite the jostling and bumping of Don Sancho's black servants between the tables with trays of steaming dishes, Dr. Urbino However, he can always maintain a smooth channel and listen to all the tracks.His ability to concentrate deteriorated every year, and even when playing chess, he had to record every move on paper to know where he was.Yet he was still able to carry on a serious conversation without losing the rhythm of the music, though not quite as well as a dear friend of his, a German orchestra conductor whom he befriended in Austria, Being able to listen to "Tannhauser" while watching the score of "Don Juan".

The second piece was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden", and Dr. Urbino felt that they had taken the drama too superficially.He listened with difficulty to the performance through the new round of noise from cutlery and plates, while his eyes fell on a flushed young man who was nodding slightly to him.No doubt he had seen him somewhere, but could not remember where.It happened a lot, especially with names, even those he knew best, but also with a certain melody he had heard in the past.This brought him great pain, and one night, he would rather die than endure the torment of amnesia until dawn.Just when he was almost at this wretched state again, a benevolent light illuminated his memory: this young man had been his pupil the previous year.He was surprised to see him here, in this kingdom of the Chosen.But Oliveria reminded him that it was the son of the Minister of Health who came here to prepare forensic papers.Dr. Juvenal Urbino waved to him joyfully, and the young doctor stood up and bowed in return.But neither then nor since did Dr. Urbino realize that this young man was the intern who had been with him that morning at the house of Jeremia de Sant-Amour.

He felt much lighter, having once again overcome aging, and was intoxicated by the clear and smooth lyrical melody of the last piece, although he did not recognize what it was.Later, the young cellist in the orchestra told him it was a Gabriel Fauré string quartet.Dr. Urbino had always paid close attention to what was new in Europe, but he had never even heard the name of this composer.Fermina Daza kept an eye on him, as usual, especially when he saw him lost in thought in public.She stopped eating, put her hand on his, pulled him back to reality, and said to him, "Don't think about that again." Dr. Urbino smiled at her absent-mindedly, At this time, he remembered the thing she was worried about again.He thought of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, and seemed to see him now in that fake military uniform, with those prop decorations, lying in a coffin, exposed to the accusing eyes of the children in the pictures on the wall.He turned around and told the Archbishop about the suicide, but the Archbishop already knew about it.Immediately after High Mass there was much talk, and the Archbishop even received a petition from General Jerónimo Argote, on behalf of all the Caribbean exiles, to have Jeremiah de Saint-Amour buried in the Holy Land."I think the application itself is disrespectful," said the archbishop, and then, in a more human tone, he asked the doctor if anyone knew the reason for the suicide.Dr. Urbino answered him with a word he thought he had invented in an instant but was accurate: senile phobia.Dr. Oliveria, who had been paying attention to the guests around him, neglected them a little at this moment and joined the teacher's conversation.He said: "It's a pity that we can still meet people who committed suicide not because of love." Dr. Urbino was not surprised to see that his lover's thoughts were exactly the same as his own.

"And, worst of all," he said, "he used gold cyanide."

As he said this, he felt that sympathy for the dead had once again overcome the pain of the letter, and for this he thanked not his wife but the miracle of music.And so he told the Archbishop about this secular saint whom he had known during long afternoons at chess, about the devotion his art had made to the happiness of children, about his rare knowledge of all things, and his simplicity. living habits.As he spoke, the doctor himself was suddenly amazed at the purity of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's soul, which had completely severed him from his past.Later, the doctor suggested to the mayor that the negatives of all the photographers' photos should be bought in order to preserve the image of a generation-maybe this generation will no longer be able to achieve happiness outside of photos, but the future of this city lies in the hands of the mayor. in their hands.The archbishop was annoyed that an educated Catholic fighter should call a suicide a saint, but he agreed with the proposal to keep the negatives.The mayor wants to know from whom to buy the negatives.Dr. Urbino's tongue was burning with the fire of secrecy, but he gritted his teeth and did not reveal the secret heir of the film."I'll take care of it," he said, relieved that he had remained loyal to the woman he had despised just five hours before.Fermina Daza saw this and in a low voice made him promise to go to the funeral.Of course I will, he said lightly, obliged.

The speeches at the banquet were short and plain.The wind band began to switch to a popular style, playing tunes that were not on the program list.The guests strolled on the terrace, waiting for the guys at Don Sancho to drain the water in the courtyard, and then to see who was interested in dancing.Only the guests at the guest table remained in the hall, applauding Dr. Urbino who drank half a glass of brandy in one gulp during the final toast.No one could remember that he had ever acted like this. Normally, he would occasionally drink a glass of good wine only to match very special dishes.But that afternoon, as the mood dictated, his cowardice was well redeemed: after so many, so many years, he finally felt like singing again.Had it not been for the sudden arrival of a brand-new car, he would no doubt have sung a song at the invitation of the young cellist who volunteered to accompany him.The car drove through the muddy yard, spattered the musicians with mud, and startled the ducks in the enclosure with its duck-like honk before finally pulling up in front of the porch.Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino Daza and his wife got out of the car, laughing up and down, holding a tray covered with openwork lace in each hand.There are many of the same trays placed in the passenger seat of the car, all the way to the driver's feet.It turned out that these were belated desserts.After the applause and genial laughter subsided, Dr. Urbino Daza explained solemnly that the nuns of Santa Clara Convent asked him to help bring desserts before it rained, but he was driving on the Royal Highway Then he turned back because he was told that his parents' house had caught fire.Dr. Juvenal Urbino was startled before his son had finished speaking.But his wife reminded him in time that he himself called the firemen to catch the parrot.Although everyone had already had their coffee, Amita de Oliveria, beaming, decided to send the guests to the terrace for dessert.However, Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife did not go, because there was hardly any time left for him to take his sacred siesta before the funeral.

He did sleep after all, but it was a short sleep, and a bad one, because when he got home he found that the firefighters had wrought no less than a fire.They hosed down a tree bare to frighten the parrots, and a stream of water was misdirected into the master bedroom window, damaging the furniture and the ancestral portraits on the walls that were completely foreign to them. irreparable damage.Neighbors heard the siren of the fire truck and thought there was a fire, so they rushed from their homes.Fortunately, the school was closed on Sunday, which did not cause more confusion.When the firefighters found that they couldn't reach the parrot even standing on the extension ladder, they began to chop off the branches with machetes.Fortunately, Dr. Urbino Daza appeared in time to stop them, so they didn't even cut down the tree trunks.They left to say that they would come back after five o'clock, and see if they needed to continue pruning.When they went out, they trampled mud on the inner balcony and the living room and tore a Turkish rug that was Fermina Daza's favorite.And worst of all, all this catastrophic damage was for naught, because it was widely believed that the parrot had taken advantage of the chaos and fled to a neighbor's yard.Indeed, Dr. Juvenal Urbino searched for some time among the trees, but he never got any response from the parrot in any language, not even whistling and singing.He decided it was lost, and didn't go back to bed until just before three o'clock.Before bed, he urinates, happily smelling the secret-garden scent of his urine, purified by warm asparagus.

He was awakened by sadness.Not the sadness he felt standing over his friend's dead body in the morning, but an invisible fog of sadness that filled his soul after a nap.He took it as an oracle, foretelling that he was spending his last afternoons. Before the age of 50, he never felt the size, weight and state of his internal organs.But after the age of 50, slowly, lying there with his eyes closed after a nap every day, he began to feel them in his body one by one, even the shape of his sleepless heart, and his mysterious liver and sealed pancreas.He gradually found that even the oldest people around him were younger than him, and he had become the only survivor in their legendary generation.When he found that he was forgetful, he turned to a method he heard from a teacher in medical school: "Those who have no memory use paper instead." However, this was only a short-lived fantasy, because in the end, He even forgot what the notes in his pocket were trying to say.He would look for them all over the house while wearing glasses, turn the key back after locking the door, and lose clues when reading a book because he forgot the cause and effect of the plot or the relationship between the characters.What troubled him most was that he could no longer trust his own reason: he felt that he was gradually losing his judgment and was falling into an irresistible disaster.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew from experience alone, albeit without scientific basis, that most deadly diseases have a peculiar smell, but none so distinct as aging.He detects it in the disembowelled corpses on the dissecting table, and recognizes it even in patients who hide their age so well, in the sweat on his own clothes and the unsuspecting breathing of his wife as she sleeps. He could smell it too.If he hadn't been a traditional old Christian at heart, perhaps he would have agreed with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour that old age was an unseemly state which should be stopped in time.The only consolation—even for a man like him who had been a good hand in bed—was the slow, benevolent death of libido: sexual serenity. At the age of 81, he is still lucid enough to realize that there are only a few thin threads that tie him to this world, and a simple change of position in sleep may disconnect them painlessly.And if it is said that he is still maintaining them as much as possible, it is entirely out of the fear of not finding God in the darkness of death.

Fermina Daza has been busy tidying up her bedroom, which has been wrecked by firefighters.Just before four o'clock she ordered for her husband his daily glass of lemonade with crushed ice and reminded him that it was time to get dressed for the funeral.This afternoon Dr. Urbino had two books at hand: The Unsolved Mysteries of the Human Body by Alexis Carrel and The Stories of Saint-Michel by Axel Monte.The pages of the latter book have not yet been cut.Dr. Urbino ordered Tigona Pardo, the cook, to fetch the ivory paperknife he had left in the bedroom.He was reading the enveloped page of The Unsolved Mystery of the Human Body when the knife came: only a few pages away, and the book was almost finished.He read slowly because of a dull ache in his head, which he attributed to the small half-glass of brandy at the last clink of glasses for the river-like headache.Between readings, he occasionally sips his lemonade or chews on a piece of ice.He had put on his socks, but his shirt had not yet been fitted with a false collar, and the green-striped elastic suspenders hung down at his sides.The thought of changing clothes to go to the funeral irritated him.He quickly stopped reading, put the book in his hand on another book, and then leaned on the rattan rocking chair and slowly rocked, looking at the yard with a heavy heart, and the banana bushes in the yard, which had been cut down. Bare mango trees, flying ants after the rain, and the ephemeral, gorgeous glow of another afternoon that never returns.He had forgotten that he had ever owned a Paramaribo parrot, and he loved it like a human being, but suddenly, he heard its voice: "Royal parrot." The voice was very close, almost at him. Beside, in an instant, he saw it on the lowest branch of the mango tree.

"Shameless fellow!" he shouted at it.

And the parrot retorted in exactly the same voice:
"You have no shame, doctor."

He continued talking to it intently, putting on his booties carefully so as not to scare it away.He slung the two braces over his shoulders and out into the muddy yard, tentatively with his walking stick so as not to trip as he descended the three terrace steps.The parrot didn't move.It stood low, so he stretched out his stick so that it would stand on the silver handle as it always did, but it avoided it.It hopped onto an adjacent branch, higher up but easier to reach because the family ladder was there before the firemen arrived.Dr. Urbino estimated the height and thought that he could reach it by going up two steps.He ascended the first step, singing a friendly song to distract the disobedient animal.The parrot didn't sing along, just repeated the lyrics, and moved a few steps away on the branch.Holding on to the ladder with both hands, he ascended the second rung without difficulty.The parrot began to sing the whole song in its entirety without moving a bit.He climbed the third step, and then the fourth, because he had miscalculated the height of the branches.Then, he held the ladder tightly with his left hand, and tentatively grabbed the parrot with his right hand.The old maid, Tigona Pardo, came to remind him that the funeral was going to be late, but she saw the back of a man on the ladder. If it weren't for the two green striped elastic straps, she couldn't believe it was Urbino doctor.

"Holy God!" she cried, "you will fall to your death!"

Dr. Urbino grabbed the parrot by the neck and let out an exclamation of triumph: It's finally all right[8].But then let it go again, as the ladder slid out under his feet.He hung in the air for a moment, realizing that he was too late to receive Holy Communion, too late to confess anything, too late to say goodbye to anyone, and he was going to die, at [-]:[-] p.m. on Pentecost Sunday.

Fermina Daza was in the kitchen eating the soup for dinner when she heard a scream from Tigona Pardo and a commotion from the servants, followed by the uproar of the neighbors.She dropped the soup spoon and ran out as fast as she could, dragging her invincible heavy body for her age, screaming like crazy—even though she didn't know what was going on under the mango tree's branches and leaves.When she saw her husband lying on his back in the muddy water, her heart seemed to burst.The husband was on the verge of death, but he was still fighting for the last minute against the fatal blow of death so that she could come in time.It pained him to leave her alone like this, and through his tears he recognized her in the panicked crowd.He gave her a last farewell look. In the half century of their life together, she had never seen his eyes so shining, so sad, and so full of gratitude.With his last breath he said to her:
"Only God knows how much I love you."

The death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino was memorable, and there can be no disputing it.No sooner had he returned from his studies in France than he brought new and powerful means to the halt of the last cholera epidemic in the province, and his reputation spread throughout the country.He was in Europe during the last cholera epidemic.That outbreak killed a quarter of the city's residents in less than three months, including his father, an equally respected doctor.Dr. Juvenal Urbino, on the strength of his rapidly acquired popularity, and a considerable donation from his family estate, founded the Medical Society, the first to be opened in the Caribbean provinces, and for many years it was The only one, Dr. Urbino serves as the lifetime president of the association.He oversaw the construction of the city's first elevated aqueduct, the first sewer system, and the construction of a covered market, bringing the otherwise garbage-strewn Bay of Souls up to sanitary standards.In addition, he is the chair of the School of Languages ​​and the School of History.And because of his contribution to the church, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem named him a knight of the Holy Sepulchre.The French government awarded him the Commander-level Legion of Honor.He was an active supporter of all religious and civic groups in the city, especially the Patriotic Committee.The council, made up of influential citizens with no political interests, put pressure on government and business with progressive ideas that were bold for the time.Among these ideas, the most memorable is an experiment with floating air balloons.The very first balloon flight brought a letter to San Juan de la Hienaga, long before air mail was finally considered rational.It was also the doctor's idea to set up an art center.Later, the Arts Center opened the Art School in the same house, which still stands today.In addition, for many years, he was a patron of the April Flower Fair[9].

What seemed impossible in a century, only he managed, namely the reconstruction of the Comedy Theater that had been transformed from colonial times into a cockfight and cock farm.It was a spectacular climax of civic movement. People from all walks of life in the city participated in this general mobilization without exception. Many people considered it a great cause.Eventually, the new Comedy Theater was inaugurated, although there were no seats and lights in the theater at the time, and those who came to the show had to bring their own seats and lamps for lighting during intermissions.Theaters replicated European grand premiere etiquette, and ladies took advantage of the opportunity to show off their long gowns and fur coats in the Caribbean dog days.But at the same time, the theater also had to allow servants to enter, so that they could move the seats and lamps, and bring what they considered necessary to eat to cope with the endless performances: you know, some programs even lasted until the beginning of the next day. at Mass.The first season of performances was kicked off by a French opera troupe.A harp in the troupe's orchestra is eye-opening, but the haunting glory belongs to a Turkish soprano with a flawless voice and dramatic flair who sings with bare feet and a twig on her toes. Wearing a ring of precious stones.Coconut oil lamps gave off thick smoke. From the first act, people could hardly see the stage clearly, and the singers were out of tune because of it. However, the reporters in the city skillfully ignored these trivial flaws and praised the worthy Something to commemorate.Undoubtedly, this was the most contagious initiative of Dr. Urbino, and the drama fever even infected the most unexpected strata of the city, from which a generation of Tristans, Othellos, Aidas and others of all kinds was born. Das and Siegfrieds.But the excitement never reached the extreme level that Dr. Urbino expected, seeing the Italian and Wagnerian clubs clash in intermission.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino never accepted any official position, although such opportunities were often offered to him unconditionally.He has been relentlessly critical of doctors who have climbed to political high places by virtue of their professional prestige.Although he has always been seen as a liberal and typically votes for a Liberal in elections, he does so more out of tradition than conviction.He was perhaps the only one of those illustrious families who would kneel in the street when the archbishop's magnificent carriage passed by.He defined himself as a natural pacifist, advocating a radical compromise between Liberals and Conservatives in the national interest.His public maverick, however, alienated him from either side: the Liberals saw him as a Goth in a cave, the Conservatives saw him as basically a Freemason, and the The Freemasons rejected him as a secret priest serving the Roman Catholic Church.His less vitriolic critics saw him as nothing more than a nobleman obsessed with Aprilflowers while his nation was shedding blood in endless wars.

There are only two things that don't seem to fit this image of him.The first was that he moved his family to the residential area of ​​the nouveau riche, leaving the ancient Casalduero Marquis Palace where the family had lived for more than a century.The other was that he married a commoner girl who had neither a noble name nor a great fortune, and who had been ridiculed behind his back for a long time by the ladies with a long string of names, until they were at last subdued and admitted Her excellence and character are several times better than all of them.Dr. Urbino has always been well aware of the criticisms of his public image in these and many other ways, and he understands better than anyone that he is the last protagonist of this endangered surname.His two children were the end of the family, and there was nothing shining about them.His son, Marco Aurelio, is a doctor like him, and he has no achievements like the eldest son in the family. He is now over fifty, and he doesn't even have a son and a half.The only daughter, Ophelia, married a good-natured New Orleans bank clerk, now in menopause, with three daughters and no sons.Although the demise of the family lineage in the long river of history made Dr. Urbino very sad, but what he worried most about death was Fermina Daza's lonely life after losing him.

All in all, this tragedy not only shook the doctor's family, but also affected the common people.They came to the street one after another, dreaming of seeing the doctor's demeanor, even if that demeanor was just a legend.Three days of mourning were declared throughout the city, flags were flown at half-mast in public institutions, and the bells of all churches rang until the graves in the family cemetery were sealed.A class of art school students made a facial cast of the body, intending to create a life-size bust from it, but the project was abandoned because it was deemed too dignified to truly portray the last-minute horror .A well-known artist who happened to be passing through here on his way to Europe painted with poignant realism a gigantic oil painting of Dr. Urbino standing on a ladder, frozen in the moment of death reaching out to catch the parrot.The only thing that does not match the grim reality is that instead of wearing a collarless shirt and green striped suspenders, he wears a bowler hat and a black woolen frock coat, an image that was taken from a newspaper article during the cholera period. illustration.The painting was put on display a few months after the tragedy in the spacious corridor of the "Golden Silk" store, for all to see, because the "Golden Silk" is a store that sells imported goods. City people will patronize, in an endless stream.Since then, the painting has appeared on the walls of all public and private institutions that considered themselves obliged to commemorate this illustrious man.In the end, it was hung in the art school, where a second funeral was held for the doctor.And many years later, the art students there also moved the oil painting out of the school, as a symbol of a certain disgusting era and a certain aesthetic, and burned it on the university square.

From the first moment of her widowhood, Fermina Daza did not appear as helpless as her husband had feared.She was unshakably determined not to allow her husband's body to be used for the benefit of any cause, even disregarding the order issued by the President of the Republic in his message of condolence, that the body be placed in a coffin in the hall of the provincial government For people to admire.With the same coolness she objected to vigils in churches, but at the request of the archbishop himself, she agreed to have the bodies placed in churches during the funeral mass in which prayers are held for the dead.Even when her son, overwhelmed by requests, came forward to speak, Fermina Daza remained steadfast in her rural concept: the dead belonged to no one but his family; Will stay in his own home, drink bitter coffee and eat cheese cakes to keep vigil for him, and everyone is free to cry as much as they want.They will skip the traditional nine-day vigil, close their doors after burials and keep their doors open except for the closest visitors.

The family was enveloped in a funeral atmosphere.All valuables have been properly preserved, the walls are bare, leaving only traces of paintings hanging there.Chairs, both homemade and borrowed from neighbors, line the walls from the living room to the bedroom.All the big furniture was removed, leaving only a grand piano lying in a corner covered with a white cloth. The empty room seemed to have no boundaries, and the sound echoed like a ghost.In the middle of the study, the body of Juvenal Urbino de la Calle lies on his father's desk, without a coffin, his face frozen with the last horror, wearing a black cloak and the knight of the Holy Sepulcher Longsword for regimental combat.Next to him Fermina Daza, trembling in filial piety but still self-controlled, received condolences without losing her composure or even moving her body until eleven o'clock the next morning.At that moment, she stood on the porch, waved her handkerchief, said "goodbye", and said goodbye to her husband.

Ever since she heard Tigona Pardo shouting in the yard and saw her beloved old man dying in the muddy water, it was not easy for her to regain such a state of self-control.Her first reaction at first was that there was still hope, because her husband's eyes were still open, and there was a radiance in his eyes that she had never seen before.She begged God to give her just a moment to let her husband know before he left that no matter what suspicions there had been between them, she still loved him so much.She felt an irresistible urge to start all over again with him, to start life afresh, so that they could tell each other everything they hadn't said, and do all the things they had done wrong in the past.But in the face of the uncompromising Grim Reaper, she had no choice but to surrender.Her pain turns into a blind anger at the world and even at herself, which in turn infuses her with self-control and the courage to face loneliness alone.Since then she had not had a moment's peace of mind, but she was careful not to let any of her expressions betray the anguish in her heart.There was only one moment when she could not help showing a certain sadness, and that was at eleven o'clock on Sunday night, when the coffin, which only bishops were entitled to use, was carried away.The coffin smelt of steamship Sapolin paint, had brass handles, and was lined with interlayered silk.Dr. Urbino Daza ordered the coffin to be closed immediately, because the heat was unbearable, the air in the house was thinned by the smell of so many flowers, and he saw faintly the first purple on his father's neck. mark.In the silence, a casual voice said: "At this age, a person is half rotten while still alive." Before the coffin was closed, Fermina Daza took off her wedding ring and put it on the coffin. her dead husband's hand, and then put her own hand over his, as she always did when she was caught rambling in public.

"We'll meet again soon," she told him.

Florentino Ariza, who was hidden among many celebrities, suddenly felt as if he had been stabbed in the side of his body.Fermina Daza did not recognize him in the confusion of the first mourners, although no one appeared more timely or tried harder during that frantic night.He is the one who puts order in the overcrowded kitchen and keeps the coffee plentiful.When the chairs borrowed from neighbors were not enough, he was the one who found more chairs;He took care not to run out of brandy for the guests at Dr. Rashides Olivelia's house.When these guests heard the bad news at the climax of the 25th anniversary celebration, they came in panic and sat around under the mango tree to continue their hilarity.When the escaped parrot appeared in the living room in the middle of the night with its head held high and its wings spread, the whole house shuddered, thinking that it was driven by regret, and only Florentino Ariza knew how to respond in time.He seized the parrot by the neck, and before it could utter a single foolish cry, it was put in a cloth-covered cage, and taken to the stables.He took care of everything in this way, so cautious and effective, no one thought he was interfering in other people's family affairs, on the contrary, at this time when the family was in crisis, what he did was regarded as a kind of helpless Thought it was helpful.

He was exactly what he appeared to be: a helpful old man with a steady demeanor.He has a strong and straight body, brown skin, sparse hair, a pair of longing eyes hidden behind round glasses with silver metal frames, a romantic mustache on his lips, and glue on the tip of the beard, although this practice has been somewhat obsolete.As a final solution to total baldness, he combed the last locks of his temple hair upwards and glued them to the center of his shiny skull with pomade.His natural delicacy and brooding demeanor endear him quickly, but are often seen as two dubious qualities in a stubborn bachelor.It took a lot of money, a lot of thought, and a lot of determination not to be noticed that he was 76 years old in the past three months.As a soul still in solitude, he firmly believes that he loves silently more deeply than anyone in the world.

The night of Dr. Urbino's death, despite the heat of hell in June, he was dressed in the same clothes he had been wearing when he had just heard the news.He was always dressed like this: a dark wool coat with a vest, a celluloid collar tied with a ribbon, a felt hat, and a black silk umbrella that doubled as a walking stick.But at daybreak, he disappeared from his wake for two hours.And with the first ray of sunshine, he came back full of vigor, neatly shaved, and exuding the fragrance of shower gel.He changed into a long black woolen dress, which he no longer normally wears except for funerals and Easter services.Instead of a tie, he wore an artist bow on his wing collar and a bowler hat.He still took the umbrella, but this time it wasn't just out of habit, but because he was sure it would rain before twelve o'clock that day.He told Dr. Urbino Daza about the possibility of rain, to see if he could bring forward the funeral.Florentino Ariza, who comes from a shipping family and is the chairman of the Caribbean River Transport Company, is very good at predicting the weather, so they did try to do so.But there was no way of coordinating in time the political, military, public and private groups, military bands and art school bands, various church schools and religious groups, since the funeral had been agreed to be at eleven o'clock.So what was expected to be a historic event ended up being doused and disconcerted by a devastating downpour.Only a few people clattered through the mud and finally reached the cemetery of Dr. Urbino's family.The cemetery is guarded by a colonial kapok tree whose lush foliage extends beyond the enclosure walls.In the same shade, outside the walls, on a small plot of land dedicated to suicides, the Caribbean exiles had buried Jeremiah de Saint-Amour the previous afternoon, and in accordance with the His last wish was to bury the dog beside him.

Florentino Ariza was one of the few who ended up at the cemetery.Drenched even to his underwear, he came home terrified, fearing he would catch pneumonia, undoing all the years of careful, meticulous care for his body.He had a glass of hot lemonade and brandy prepared for himself, and sat up on the bed, washed down two aspirins with it, and sweated profusely under the woolen quilt until he regained his strength.When he returned to the wake again, he felt full of energy.Fermina Daza resumed the duties of the house.The home has been cleaned and is ready for guests.On the small altar in the study stood a portrait of the late hostess, drawn in crayons and tied with a black ribbon in the frame.At eight o'clock in the evening, the house was packed and the weather was as hot as the night before.After the rosary was said, there were rounds of pleas to go back early so that the widow of the deceased could rest, for she had not rested since Sunday afternoon.

For most of the guests, Fermina Daza said her farewell standing at the altar, but for those dear friends who stayed until the last to leave, she sent them all the way to the gate on the street, ready to go as usual , close the door in person.Just as she was about to close the door with the last of her strength, she saw Florentino Ariza standing in the middle of the empty living room in mourning.She rejoiced because she had erased him from her life so many years ago, and now she saw him for the first time, seeing his face emerge clearly from oblivion.But before Fermina had time to thank him for his visit, he put the hat on his chest tremblingly and solemnly, letting out the pain of lovesickness that had kept him alive for so long.

"Fermina," he said to her, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century to reaffirm to you once again my eternal loyalty and unfailing love for you."

Fermina would have thought that the man standing before her was a lunatic if she had not had reason to believe that Florentino Ariza had been inspired at that moment by the grace of the Holy Spirit.Her immediate reaction was to curse him for desecrating her family while her husband was still alive.But the majesty of the rage stopped her. "Go away!" she said to him, "don't let me see you again as long as you live." She opened the door that was about to close completely again, and said firmly:
"I hope it's not a few years away, too."

She heard the footsteps fade away in the silent street, and then slowly closed the door, bolted it, fastened the lock, and faced her fate alone.Before this moment, she had never fully realized the weight and consequences of the tragedy she had caused in her youth, that it would follow her all the way to her death.For the first time since the afternoon of her husband's accident, she cried, and no one was there, and it was the only way she could cry.She cries for her husband's death, for her loneliness and anger.She cried for herself again as she entered the empty bedroom, for she had rarely slept alone in that bed since she was no longer a virgin.Everything related to her husband made her sad: the slippers with tassels, the pajamas under the pillow, the mirror on the dressing table without his figure, and the smell he left on her skin.An inexplicable thought made her tremble: "When a loved one dies, he should take all his things with him." She didn't want to be helped to bed, and she didn't want to eat anything before going to bed.The pain weighed her down, and she prayed to God to let her die in her sleep tonight.With this fantasy in mind, she took off her shoes, lay down with all her clothes on, and fell asleep in no time.She fell asleep without knowing it, but she knew she was still alive, she knew that half of the bed was empty, she was lying on the left side as usual, but she didn't have another body on the right side to keep her balance.She thought while sleeping.She cried in her sleep when she thought she would never be able to sleep like she used to.She was sobbing while sleeping, but she never changed her position and was still lying on the left side of the bed.Until the cock crowed, until the unwelcome sunlight of this morning without him woke her up.After that, she lay down for a long time.Only then did she realize that she had slept for a long time but had not died, but had been crying in her dreams; that she was crying as she slept, thinking more about Florentino Ariza than about him. her dead husband.

(End of this chapter)