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

for the eyeglasses he was wearing, turn the key again after locking the doors, and lose the sense of what he was reading because he forgot the premise of the argument or the relationshipsamong the characters. But what disturbed him most was his lack of confidence in his own power of reason: little by little, as in an ineluctable shipwreck, he felt himself losing his good judgment.
    With no scientific basis except his own experience, Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew that most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but that none was as specific as old age. He detected it in the cadaversslit open from head to toe on the dissecting table, he even recognized it in patients who hid their age with the greatest success, he smelled it in the perspiration on his own clothing and in the unguarded breathing of his sleeping wife. If he had not been what he was—in essence an old-style Christian—perhaps he would have agreed with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour that old age was an indecent statethat had to be ended before it was too late. The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, andif he did allhe could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
    Fermina Daza had been busy straightening the bedroom that had been destroyed by the firemen, and a little before four she sent for her husband’s daily glass of lemonade with chipped ice and reminded him that he should dress for the funeral. That afternoon Dr. Urbino hadtwo books by his hand: 
Man, the Unknown
 by Alexis Carrel and 
The Story of San Michele
 by Axel Munthe; the pages of the second book were still uncut, and he asked Digna Pardo, the cook, to bring him the marble paper cutter he had left in the bedroom. But when it was brought to him he was already reading 
Man, the Unknown
 at the place he had marked with an envelope: there were only a few pages lefttill the end. He read slowly, making his way through the meanderings of a slight headache that he attributed to the half glass of brandy at the final toast. When he paused in his reading he sipped the lemonade or took his time chewing on a piece of ice. He was wearing his socks, and his shirt without its starched collar; his elastic suspenders with the green stripes hung down from his waist. Themere idea of having to change for the funeral irritated him. Soon he stopped reading, placed one book on top of the other, and began to rock very slowly in the wicker rocking chair, contemplating with regret the banana plants in the mire of the patio, the stripped mango, the flying ants that came after the rain, the ephemeral splendor of another afternoon that would never return. He had forgottenthat he ever owned a parrot from Paramaribo whom he loved as if he were a human being, when suddenly he heard him say: “Royal parrot.” His voice sounded close by, almost next to him, and then he saw him in the lowest branch of the mango tree.
    “You scoundrel!” he shouted.
    The parrot answered in an identical voice:
    “You’re even more of a scoundrel, Doctor.”
    He continued to talk to him, keepinghim in view while he put on his boots with great care so as not to frighten him and pulled his suspenders up over his arms and went down to the patio, which was still full of mud, testing the ground with his stick so that he would not trip on the three steps of the terrace. The parrot did not move, and perched so close to the ground that Dr. Urbino held out his walking stick for him so that hecould sit on the silver handle, aswas his custom, but the parrot sidestepped and jumped to the next branch, a little higher up but easier to reach since the house ladder had been leaning against it