Love in the Time of Cholera Read Online Free PDF Page B

civic and cultural enterprises, was content to assume that in the midst of somany abominable creatures his wife was not only the most beautiful woman in the Caribbean but also the happiest. But one rainy afternoon, at the end of an exhausting day, he encountered a disaster in the house that brought him to his senses. Out of the drawing room, and for as far as the eye could see, a stream of dead animals floated in a marsh of blood. The servant girls had climbed on the chairs,not knowing what to do, and they had not yet recovered from the panic of the slaughter.
    One of the German mastiffs, maddened by a sudden attack of rabies, had torn to pieces every animal of any kind that crossed its path, until the gardener from the house next door found the courage to face him and hack him to pieces with his machete. No one knewhow many creatures he had bitten or contaminatedwith his green slaverings, and so Dr. Urbino ordered the survivors killed and their bodies burned in an isolated field, and he requested the services of Misericordia Hospital for a thorough disinfecting of the house. The only animal to escape, because nobody remembered him, was the giant lucky charm tortoise.
    Fermina Daza admitted for the first time that her husband was right in a domestic matter,and for a long while afterward she was careful to say no more about animals. She consoled herself with color illustrations from Linnaeus’s 
Natural History
, which she framed and hung on the drawing room walls, and perhaps she would eventually have lost all hope of ever seeing an animal in the house again if it had not been for the thieves who, early one morning, forced a bathroom window and madeoff with the silver service that had been in the family for five generations. Dr. Urbino put double padlocks on the window frames, secured the doors on the inside with iron crossbars, placed his most valuable possessions in the strongbox, and belatedly acquired the wartime habit of sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. But he opposed the purchase of a fierce dog, vaccinated or unvaccinated,running loose or chained up, even if thieves were to steal everything he owned.
    “Nothing that does not speak will come into this house,” he said.
    He said it to put an end to the specious arguments of his wife, who was once again determined to buy a dog, and he never imagined that his hasty generalization was to cost him his life. Fermina Daza, whose straightforward character had become moresubtle with the years, seized on her husband’s casual words, and months after the robbery she returned to the ships from Curaçao and bought a royal Paramaribo parrot, who knew only the blasphemies of sailors but said them in a voice so human that he was well worth the extravagant price of twelve centavos.
    He was a fine parrot, lighter than he seemed, with a yellow head and a black tongue, theonly way to distinguish him from mangrove parrots who did not learn to speak even with turpentine suppositories. Dr. Urbino, a good loser, bowed to the ingenuity of his wife and was even surprised at how amused he was by the advances the parrot made when he was excited by the servant girls. On rainy afternoons, his tongue loosened by the pleasure of having his feathersdrenched, he uttered phrasesfrom another time, which he could not have learned in the house and which led one to think that he was much older than he appeared. The Doctor’s final doubts collapsed one night when the thieves tried to get in again through a skylight in the attic, and the parrot frightened them with a mastiff’s barking that could not have been more realistic if it had been real, and with shouts of stop thiefstop thief stop thief, two saving graces he had not learned in the house. It was then that Dr. Urbino took charge of him and ordered the construction of a perch under the mango tree with a container for water, another for ripe bananas, and a trapeze for acrobatics. From December through March, when the nights were cold and