Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman Read Free Book Online

and live there by herself. And it was not an idle threat: she really did want to leave and did notcare about the scandal, and her husband realized this in time. He did not have the courage to defy his own prejudices, and he capitulated. Not in the sense that he admitted there had been soap in the bathroom, but insofar as he continued to live in the same house with her, although they slept in separate rooms, and he did not say a word to her. They ate in silence, sparring with so much skill thatthey sent each other messages across the table through the children, and the children never realized that they were not speaking to each other.
    Since the study had no bathroom, the arrangement solved the problem of noise in the morning, because he came in to bathe after preparing his class and made a sincere effort not to awaken his wife. They would often arrive at the bathroom at the same time,and then they took turns brushing their teeth before going to sleep. After four months had gone by, he lay down on their double bed one night to read until she came out of the bathroom, as he often did, and he fell asleep. She lay down beside him in a rather careless way so that he would wake up and leave. And in fact he did stir, but instead of getting up he turned out the light and settled himselfon the pillow. She shook him by the shoulder to remind him that he was supposed to go to the study, but it felt so comfortable to be back in his great-grandparents’ featherbed that he preferred to capitulate.
    “Let me stay here,” he said. “There was soap.”
    When they recalled this episode, now they had rounded the corner of old age, neither could believe the astonishing truth that this had beenthe most serious argument in fifty years of living together, and the only one that had made them both want to abandon their responsibilities and begin a new life. Even when they were old and placid they were careful about bringing it up, for the barely healedwounds could begin to bleed again as if they had been inflicted only yesterday.
    He was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate. Sheheard him on their wedding night, while she lay prostrate with seasickness in the stateroom on the ship that was carrying them to France, and the sound of his stallion’s stream seemed so potent, so replete with authority, that it increased her terror of the devastation to come. That memory often returned to her as the years weakened the stream, for she never could resign herself to his wettingthe rim of the toilet bowl each time he used it. Dr. Urbino tried to convince her, with arguments readily understandable to anyone who wished to understand them, that the mishap was not repeated every day through carelessness on his part, as she insisted, but because of organic reasons: as a young man his stream was so defined and so direct that when he was at school he won contests for marksmanshipin filling bottles, but with the ravages of age it was not only decreasing, it was also becoming oblique and scattered, and had at last turned into a fantastic fountain, impossible to control despite his many efforts to direct it. He would say: “The toilet must have been invented by someone who knew nothing about men.” He contributed to domestic peace with a quotidian act that was more humiliatingthan humble: he wiped the rim of the bowl with toilet paper each time he used it. She knew, but never said anything as long as the ammoniac fumes were not too strong in the bathroom, and then she proclaimed, as if she had uncovered a crime: “This stinks like a rabbit hutch.” On the eve of old age this physical difficulty inspired Dr. Urbino with the ultimate solution: he urinated sitting down,as she did, which kept the bowl clean and him in a state of grace.
    By this time he could do very little for himself, and the possibility of a fatal slip in the tub put him on his guard against the shower. The house was modern and did not have the pewter tub with lion’s-paw feet common in