th Fermina Daza, he was going to tell her that he had not revealed the secret of his love, not even to the one person who had earned the right to know it. No: he would never reveal it, not even to Leona Cassiani, not because he did not want to open the chest where he had kept it so carefully hidden for half his life, but because he realized only then that he had lost the key.
That, however, was not the most staggering event of the afternoon. He still had the nostalgic memory of his youth, his vivid recollection of the Poetic Festival, whose thunder sounded throughout the Antilles every April 15. He was always one of the protagonists, but always, as in almost everything he did, a secret protagonist. He had participated several times since the inaugural competition, and he had never received even honorable mention. But that did not matter to him, for he did compete not out of ambition for the prize but because the contest held an additional attraction for him: in the first session Fermina Daza had opened the sealed envelopes and announced the names of the winners, and then it was established that she would continue to do so in the years that followed.
Hidden in the darkness of an orchestra seat, a fresh camellia in the buttonhole of his lapel throbbing with the strength of his desire, Florentino Ariza saw Fermina Daza open the three sealed envelopes on the stage of the old National Theater on the night of the first Festival. He asked himself what was going to happen in her heart when she discovered that he was the winner of the Golden Orchid. He was certain she would recognize his handwriting, and that then she would evoke the afternoons of embroidery under the almond trees in the little park, the scent of faded gardenias in his letters, the private Waltz of the Crowned Goddess at windblown daybreak. It did not happen. Even worse, the Golden Orchid, the most sought-after prize among the nation's poets, was awarded to a Chinese immigrant. The public scandal provoked by that unheard-of decision threw doubts on the seriousness of the competition. But the decision was correct, and the unanimity of the judges had its justification in the excellence of the sonnet.
No one believed that the author was the Chinese who received the prize. At the end of the last century, fleeing the scourge of yellow fever that devastated Panama during the construction of the railroad between the two oceans, he had arrived along with many others who stayed here until they died, living in Chinese, reproducing in Chinese, and looking so much alike that no one could tell one from the other. At first there were no more than ten, some of them with their wives and children and edible dogs, but in a few years four narrow streets in the slums along the port were overflowing with other, unexpected Chinese, who came into the country without leaving a trace in the customs records. Some of the young ones turned into venerable patriarchs with so much haste that no one could explain how they had time to grow old. In the popular view they were divided into two kinds: bad Chinese and good Chinese. The bad ones were those in the lugubrious restaurants along the waterfront, where one was as likely to eat like a king as to die a sudden death at the table, sitting before a plate of rat meat with sunflowers, and which were thought to be nothing more than fronts for white slavery and many other kinds of traffic. The good ones were the Chinese in the laundries, heirs of a sacred knowledge, who returned one's shirts cleaner than new, with collars and cuffs like recently ironed Communion wafers. The man who defeated seventy-two well-prepared rivals in the Poetic Festival was one of these good Chinese.
When a bewildered Fermina Daza read out the name, no one understood it, not only because it was an unusual name but because no one knew for certain what Chinese were called. But it was not necessary to think about it very much, because the victorious Chinese walked from the back of the theater with that celestial smile Chinese wear when they come home early. He had been so sure of victory that he had put on a yellow silk robe, appropriate to the rites of spring, in order to accept the prize. He received the eighteen-carat Golden Orchid and kissed it with joy in the midst of the thundering jeers of the incredulous. He did not react. He waited in the middle of the stage, as imperturbable as the apostle of a Divine Providence less dramatic than ours, and as soon as it was quiet he read the winning poem. No one understood him. But when the new round of jeers and whistles was over, an impassive Fermina Daza read it again, in her hoarse, suggestive voice, and amazement reigned after the first line. It was a perfect sonnet in the purest Parnassian tradition, and through it there wafted a breath of inspiration that revealed the involvement of a master hand. The only possible explanation was that one of the great poets had devised the joke in order to ridicule the Poetic Festival, and that the Chinese had been a party to it and was determined to keep the secret until the day he died. The Commercial Daily, our traditional newspaper, tried to save our civic honor with an erudite and rather confused essay concerning the antiquity and cultural influence of the Chinese in the Caribbean, and the right they had earned to participate in Poetic Festivals. The author of the essay did not doubt that the writer of the sonnet was in fact who he said he was, and he defended him in a straightforward manner, beginning with the title itself: "All Chinese Are Poets." The instigators of the plot, if there was one, rotted in their graves along with the secret. For his part, the Chinese who had won died without confession at an Oriental age and was buried with the Golden Orchid in his coffin, but also with the bitterness of never having achieved the only thing he wanted in his life, which was recognition as a poet. On his death, the press recalled the forgotten incident of the Poetic Festival and reprinted the sonnet with a Modernist vignette of fleshy maidens and gold cornucopias, and the guardian angels of poetry took advantage of the opportunity to clarify matters: the sonnet seemed so bad to the younger generation that no one could doubt any longer that it had, in fact, been composed by the dead Chinese.
Florentino Ariza always associated that scandalous event with the memory of an opulent stranger who sat beside him. He had noticed her at the beginning of the ceremony, but then he had forgotten her in the frightful suspense of anticipation. She attracted his attention because of her mother-of-pearl whiteness, her happy plump woman's scent, her immense soprano's bosom crowned by an artificial magnolia. She wore a very close-fitting black velvet dress, as black as her eager warm eyes, and her hair, caught at the nape of her neck with a gypsy comb, was blacker still. She wore pendant earrings, a matching necklace, and identical rings, shaped like sparkling roses, on several fingers. A beauty mark had been drawn with pencil on her right cheek. In the din of the final applause, she looked at Florentino Ariza with sincere grief.
"Believe me, my heart goes out to you," she said to him.
Florentino Ariza was amazed, not because of the condolences, which he in fact deserved, but because of his overwhelming astonishment that anyone knew his secret. She explained: "I knew because of how the flower trembled in your lapel as they opened the envelopes." She showed him the velvet magnolia in her hand, and she opened her heart to him.
"That is why I took off mine," she said.
She was on the verge of tears because of his defeat, but Florentino Ariza raised her spirits with his instincts of a nocturnal hunter.
"Let us go someplace where we can cry together," he said.
He accompanied her to her house. At the door, since it was almost midnight and there was no one on the street, he persuaded her to invite him in for a brandy while they looked at the scrapbooks and photograph albums, containing over ten years of public events, which she had told him she owned. It was an old trick even then, but this time it was guileless, because she was the one who had talked about her albums as they walked from the National Theater. They went in. The first thing Florentino Ariza observed in the living room was that the door to the only bedroom was open, and that the bed was huge and luxurious with a brocaded quilt and a headboard with brass foliage. That disturbed him. She must have realized it, for she crossed the living room and closed the bedroom door. Then she invited him to sit down on a flowered cretonne sofa where a sleeping cat was lying, and she placed her collection of albums on the coffee table. Florentino Ariza began to leaf through them in an unhurried way, thinking more about his next step than about what he was seeing, and then he looked up and saw that her eyes were full of tears. He advised her to cry to her heart's content, and to feel no shame, for there was no greater relief than weeping, but he suggested that she loosen her bodice first. He hurried to help her, because her bodice was tightly fastened in the back with a long closure of crossed laces. He did not have to unlace them all, for the bodice burst open from sheer internal pressure, and her astronomical bosom was able to breathe freely.
Florentino Ariza, who had never lost the timidity of a novice even in comfortable circumstances, risked a superficial caress on her neck with the tips of his fingers, and she writhed and moaned like a spoiled child and did not stop crying. Then he kissed her on the same spot, just as softly, and he could not kiss her a second time because she turned toward him with all her monumental body, eager and warm, and they rolled in an embrace on the floor. The cat on the sofa awoke with a screech and jumped on top of them. They groped like desperate virgins and found each other any way they could, wallowing in the torn albums, fully dressed, soaked with sweat, and more concerned with avoiding the furious claws of the cat than with the disastrous love they were making. But beginning the following night, their scratches still bleeding, they continued to make love for several years.
When he realized that he had begun to love her, she was in the fullness of her years, and he was approaching his thirtieth birthday. Her name was Sara Noriega, and she had enjoyed fifteen minutes of fame in her youth when she won a competition with a collection of poems about love among the poor, a book that was never published. She was a teacher of deportment and civics in the public schools, and she lived on her salary in a rented flat in the motley Sweethearts' Mews in the old Gethsemane District. She had had several occasional lovers, but none with intentions of matrimony, because it was difficult for a man of her time and place to marry a woman he had taken to bed. Nor did she cherish that dream again after her first formal fiance, whom she loved with the almost demented passion of which one is capable at the age of eighteen, broke the engagement one week before the date they had set for the wedding, and left her to wander the limbo of abandoned brides. Or of used goods, as they used to say in those days. And yet that first experience, although cruel and short-lived, did not leave her bitter; rather, she had the overwhelming conviction that with or without marriage, or God, or the law, life was not worth living without a man in her bed. What Florentino Ariza liked best about her was that in order to reach the heights of glory, she had to suck on an infant's pacifier while they made love. Eventually they had a string of them, in every size, shape, and color they could find in the market, and Sara Noriega hung them on the headboard so she could reach them without looking in her moments of extreme urgency.
Although she was as free as he was, and perhaps would not have been opposed to making their relationship public, from the very first Florentino Ariza considered it a clandestine adventure. He would slip in by the back door, almost always very late at night, and sneak away on tiptoe just before dawn. He knew as well as she that in a crowded and subdivided building like hers the neighbors had to know more than they pretended. But although it was a mere formality, that was how Florentino Ariza was, how he would be with all women for the rest of his life. He never made a slip, with her or with any other woman; he never betrayed their confidence. He did not exaggerate: on only one occasion did he leave a compromising trace or written evidence, and this might have cost him his life. In truth, he always behaved as if he were the eternal husband of Fermina Daza, an unfaithful husband but a tenacious one, who fought endlessly to free himself from his servitude without causing her the displeasure of a betrayal.
Such secretiveness could not flourish without misapprehensions. Transito Ariza died in the conviction that the son she had conceived in love and raised for love was immune to any kind of love because of his first youthful misfortune. But many less benevolent people who were very close to him, who were familiar with his mysterious character and his fondness for mystic ceremonies and strange lotions, shared the suspicion that he was immune not to love but only to women. Florentino Ariza knew it and never did anything to disprove it. It did not worry Sara Noriega either. Like the countless other women who loved him, and even those who gave and received pleasure without loving him, she accepted him for what he really was: a man passing through.
He eventually showed up at her house at any hour, above all on Sunday mornings, the most peaceful time. She would leave whatever she was doing, no matter what it was, and devote her entire body to trying to make him happy in the enormous mythic bed that was always ready for him, and in which she never permitted the invocation of liturgical formalisms. Florentino Ariza did not understand how a single woman without a past could be so wise in the ways of men, or how she could move her sweet porpoise body with as much lightness and tenderness as if she were moving under water. She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: "You are either born knowing how, or you never know." Florentino Ariza writhed with retrogressive jealousy, thinking that perhaps she had more of a past than she pretended, but he had to swallow everything she said because he told her, as he told them all, that she had been his only lover. Among many other things that he did not like, he had to resign himself to having the furious cat in bed with them, although Sara Noriega had his claws removed so he would not tear them apart while they made love.
However, almost as much as rolling in bed until they were exhausted, she liked to devote the aftermath of love to the cult of poetry. She had an astonishing memory for the sentimental verses of her own time, which were sold in the street in pamphlet form for two centavos as soon as they were written, and she also pinned on the walls the poems she liked most, so that she could read them aloud whenever she wished. She had written versions of the deportment and civics texts in hendecasyllabic couplets, like those used for spelling, but she could not obtain official approval for them. Her declamatory passion was such that at times she continued to shout her recitation as they made love, and Florentino Ariza had to force a pacifier into her mouth, as one did with children to make them stop crying.
In the plenitude of their relationship, Florentino Ariza had asked himself which of the two was love: the turbulent bed or the peaceful Sunday afternoons, and Sara Noriega calmed him with the simple argument that love was everything they did naked. She said: "Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down." Sara Noriega thought this definition would be good for a poem about divided love, which they wrote together and which she submitted to the Fifth Poetic Festival, convinced that no participant had ever presented such an original poem. But she lost again.
She was in a rage as Florentino Ariza accompanied her to her house. For some reason she could not explain, she was convinced that Fermina Daza had plotted against her so that her poem would not win first prize. Florentino Ariza paid no attention to her. He had been in a somber mood ever since the awarding of the prizes, for he had not seen Fermina Daza in a long time, and that night he had the impression that she had undergone a profound change: for the first time one could tell just by looking at her that she was a mother. This came as no surprise to him, for he knew that her son was already in school. However, her maternal age had never seemed so apparent to him as it did that night, as much for the size of her waist and the slight shortness of breath when she walked as for the break in her voice when she read the list of prizewinners.
In an attempt to document his memories, he leafed through the albums of the Poetic Festivals while Sara Noriega prepared something to eat. He saw magazine photographs in color, yellowing postcards of the sort sold in arcades for souvenirs, and it was a kind of ghostly review of the fallacy of his own life. Until that time he had maintained the fiction that it was the world that was changing, and its customs and styles: everything but her. But that night he saw for the first time in a conscious way how Fermina Daza's life was passing, and how his was passing, while he did nothing more than wait. He had never spoken about her to anyone, because he knew he was incapable of saying her name without everyone's noticing the pallor of his lips. But that night, as he looked through the albums as he had done on so many other evenings of Sunday tedium, Sara Noriega made one of those casual observations that freeze the blood.
"She's a whore," she said.
She said it as she walked past him and saw a print of Fermina Daza disguised as a black panther at a masquerade ball, and she did not have to mention anyone by name for Florentino Ariza to know whom she was talking about. Fearing a revelation that would shake his very life, he hurried to a cautious defense. He objected that he knew Fermina Daza only from a distance, that they had never gone further than formal greetings, that he had no information about her private life, but was certain she was an admirable woman who had come out of nowhere and risen to the top by virtue of her own merits.
"By virtue of marrying a man she does not love for money," interrupted Sara Noriega. "That's the lowest kind of whore." His mother had told Florentino Ariza the same thing, with less crudeness but with the same moral rigidity, when she tried to console him for his misfortunes. Shaken to the very core, he could find no appropriate response to Sara Noriega's harshness, and he attempted to change the subject. But Sara Noriega would not allow that to happen until she had given vent to her feelings. In a flash of inspiration that she could not have explained, she was convinced that Fermina Daza had been the one behind the conspiracy to cheat her of the prize. There was no reason to think so: they did not know each other, they had never met, and Fermina Daza had nothing to do with the decision of the judges even though she was privy to their secrets. Sara Noriega said in a categorical manner: "We women intuit these things." And that ended the discussion.
From that moment on, Florentino Ariza began to see her with different e