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

husband held Jeremiah de Saint-Amour in esteem not for what he had once been but for what he beganto be after he arrived here with only his exile’s rucksack, and she could not understand why he was so distressed by the disclosure of his true identity at this late date. She did not comprehend why he thought it an abomination that he had had a woman in secret, since that was an atavistic custom of a certain kind of man, himself included, yes even he in a moment of ingratitude, and besides, itseemed to her a heartbreaking proof of love that she had helped him carry out his decision to die. She said: “If you also decided to do that for reasons as serious as his, my duty would be to do what she did.” Once again Dr. Urbino found himself face to face with the simple incomprehension that had exasperated him for a half a century.
    “You don’t understand anything,” he said. “What infuriatesme is not what he was or what he did, but the deception he practiced on all of us for so many years.”
    His eyes began to fill with easy tears, but she pretended not to see.
    “He did the right thing,” she replied. “If he had told the truth, not you or that poor woman or anybody in this town would have loved him as much as they did.”
    She threaded his watch chain through the buttonhole in his vest.She put the finishing touches to the knot in his tie and pinned on his topaz tiepin. Then she dried his eyes and wiped his teary beard with the handkerchief sprinkled with florida water and put that in his breast pocket, its corners spread open like a magnolia. The eleven strokes of the pendulum clock sounded in the depths of the house.
    “Hurry,” she said, taking him by the arm. “We’ll be late.”
    Aminta Dechamps, Dr. Lácides Olivella’s wife, and her seven equally diligent daughters, had arranged every detail so that the silver anniversary luncheon would be the social event of the year. The family home, in the very center of the historic district, was the old mint, denatured by a Florentine architect who came through here like an ill wind blowing renovation and converted many seventeenth-centuryrelics into Venetian basilicas. It had six bedrooms and two large, well-ventilated dining and reception rooms, but that was not enough space for the guests from the city, not to mention the very select few from out of town. The patio was like an abbey cloister, with a stone fountain murmuring in the center and pots of heliotrope that perfumed the house at dusk, but the space among the arcadeswas inadequate for so many grand family names. So it was decided to hold the luncheon in their country house that was ten minutes away by automobile along the King’s Highway and had over an acre of patio, and enormous Indian laurels, and local water lilies in a gently flowing river. The men from Don Sancho’s Inn, under the supervision of Señora de Olivella, hung colored canvas awnings in thesunny areas and raised a platform under the laurels with tables for one hundred twenty-two guests, with a linen tablecloth on each of them and bouquets of the day’s fresh roses for the table of honor. They also built a wooden dais for a woodwind band whose program was limited to contradances and national waltzes, and for a string quartet from the School of Fine Arts, which was Señora de Olivella’ssurprise for her husband’s venerable teacher, who would preside over the luncheon. Although the date did not correspond exactly to the anniversary of his graduation, they chose Pentecost Sunday in order to magnify the significance of the celebration.
    The preparations had begun three months earlier, for fear that something indispensable would be left undone for lack of time. They brought in livechickens from Ciénaga de Oro, famous all along the coast not only for their size and flavor but because in colonial timesthey had scratched for food in alluvial deposits and little nuggets of pure gold were found in their gizzards. Señora de Olivella herself,