Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman Page A

pulse, the hoarse breathing, and the pale perspiration of a dying man. But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patientand then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera. He prescribed infusions of linden blossoms to calm the nerves and suggested a change of air so he could find consolation in distance, but Florentino Ariza longed for just the opposite: to enjoy his martyrdom.
    Tránsito Ariza was a freed quadroon whose instinct for happiness had been frustratedby poverty, and she took pleasure in her son’s suffering as if it were her own. She made him drink the infusions when he became delirious, and she smothered him in wool blankets to keep away the chills, but at the same time she encouraged him to enjoy his prostration.
    “Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can,” she said to him, “because these things don’t last yourwhole life.”
    In the Postal Agency, of course, they did not agree. Florentino Ariza had become negligent, and he was so distracted that he confused the flags that announced the arrival of the mail, and one Wednesday he hoisted the German flag when the ship was from the Leyland Company and carried the mail from Liverpool, and on another day he flew the flag of the United States when the ship wasfrom the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique and carried the mail from Saint-Nazaire. These confusions of love caused such chaos in the distribution of the mail and provoked so many protests from the public that if Florentino Ariza did not lose his job it was because Lotario Thugut kept him at the telegraph and took him to play the violin in the Cathedral choir. They had a friendship difficult tounderstand because of the difference in their ages, for they might have been grandfather and grandson, but they got along at work as well as they did in the taverns around the port, which were frequented by everyone out for the evening regardless of social class, from drunken beggars to young gentlemen in tuxedos who fled the gala parties at the Social Club to eat fried mullet and coconut rice. LotarioThugut was in the habit of going there after the last shift at the telegraph office, and dawn often found him drinking Jamaican punch and playing the accordion withthe crews of madmen from the Antillean schooners. He was corpulent and bull-necked, with a golden beard and a liberty cap that he wore when he went out at night, and all he needed was a string of bells to look like St. Nicholas. Atleast once a week he ended the evening with a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a transient hotel for sailors. When he met Florentino Ariza, the first thing he did, with a certain magisterial delight, was to initiate him into the secrets of his paradise. He chose for him the little birds he thought best, he discussed their price and style with them andoffered to pay in advance with his own money for their services. But Florentino Ariza did not accept: he was a virgin, and he had decided not to lose his virginity unless it was for love.
    The hotel was a colonial palace that had seen better days, and its great marble salons and rooms were divided into plasterboard cubicles with peepholes, which were rented out as much for watching as for doing.There was talk of busybodies who had their eyes poked out with knitting needles, of a man who recognized his own wife as the woman he was spying on, of well-bred gentlemen who came disguised as tarts to forget who they were with the boatswains on shore leave, and of so many other misadventures of observers and observed that the mere idea of going into the next room terrified Florentino Ariza. Andso Lotario Thugut could never persuade him that watching and letting himself be watched were the refinements of European