IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequitedlove. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. TheAntillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, andhis most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromaticfumes of gold cyanide.

He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where he had always slept,and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporise the poison. On the floor,tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and next tohim were the crutches. At one window the splendour of dawn was just beginning to illuminate thestifling, crowded room that served as both bedroom and laboratory, but there was enough light forhim to recognise at once the authority of death. The other windows, as well as every other chink inthe room, were muffled with rags or sealed with black cardboard, which increased the oppressiveheaviness. A counter was crammed with jars and bottles without labels and two crumbling pewtertrays under an ordinary light bulb covered with red paper. The third tray, the one for the fixativesolution, was next to the body. There were old magazines and newspapers everywhere, piles ofnegatives on glass plates, broken furniture, but everything was kept free of dust by a diligent hand.

Although the air coming through the window had purified the atmosphere, there still remained forthe one who could identify it the dying embers of hapless love in the bitter almonds. Dr. JuvenalUrbino had often thought, with no premonitory intention, that this would not be a propitious placefor dying in a state of grace. But in time he came to suppose that perhaps its disorder obeyed anobscure determination of Divine Providence.

A police inspector had come forward with a very young medical student who was completinghis forensic training at the municipal dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room andcovered the body while waiting for Dr. Urbino to arrive. They greeted him with a solemnity thaton this occasion had more of condolence than veneration, for no one was unaware of the degree ofhis friendship with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. The eminent teacher shook hands with each of them,as he always did with every one of his pupils before beginning the daily class in general clinicalmedicine, and then, as if it were a flower, he grasped the hem of the blanket with the tips of hisindex finger and his thumb, and slowly uncovered the body with sacramental circumspection.

Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was completely naked, stiff and twisted, eyes open, body blue, lookingfifty years older than he had the night before. He had luminous pupils, yellowish beard and hair,and an old scar sewn with baling knots across his stomach. The use of crutches had made his torsoand arms as broad as a galley slave's, but his defenceless legs looked like an orphan's. Dr. JuvenalUrbino studied him for a moment, his heart aching as it rarely had in the long years of his futilestruggle against death.

"Damn fool," he said. "The worst was over."He covered him again with the blanket and regained his academic dignity. His eightiethbirthday had been celebrated the year before with an official three-day jubilee, and in his thank-you speech he had once again resisted the temptation to retire. He had said: "I'll have plenty oftime to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans." Although he heard lessand less with his right ear, and leaned on a silver-handled cane to conceal his faltering steps, hecontinued to wear a linen suit, with a gold watch chain across his vest, as smartly as he had in hisyounger years. His Pasteur beard, the colour of mother-of-pearl, and his hair, the same colour,carefully combed back and with a neat part in the middle, were faithful expressions of his character. He compensated as much as he could for an increasingly disturbing erosion of memoryby scribbling hurried notes on scraps of paper that ended in confusion in each of his pockets, asdid the instruments, the bottles of medicine, and all the other things jumbled together in hiscrowded medical bag. He was not only the city's oldest and most illustrious physician, he was alsoits most fastidious man. Still, his too obvious display of learning and the disingenuous manner inwhich he used the power of his name had won him less affection than he deserved.

His instructions to the inspector and the intern were precise and rapid. There was no need foran autopsy; the odour in the house was sufficient proof that the cause of death had been thecyanide vapours activated in the tray by some photographic acid, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amourknew too much about those matters for it to have been an accident. When the inspector showedsome hesitation, he cut him off with the kind of remark that was typical of his manner: "Don'tforget that I am the one who signs the death certificate." The young doctor was disappointed: hehad never had the opportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. JuvenalUrbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in aninstant from the young man's easy blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrivalto the city. He said: "There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you thechance one of these days." And only after he said it did he realise that among the countlesssuicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by thesufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.

"And when you do find one, observe with care," he said to the intern: "they almost alwayshave crystals in their heart."Then he spoke to the inspector as he would have to a subordinate. He ordered him tocircumvent all the legal procedures so that the burial could take place that same afternoon andwith the greatest discretion. He said: "I will speak to the Mayor later." He knew that Jeremiah deSaint-Amour lived in primitive austerity and that he earned much more with his art than heneeded, so that in one of the drawers in the house there was bound to be more than enough moneyfor the funeral expenses.

"But if you do not find it, it does not matter," he said. "I will take care of everything."He ordered him to tell the press that the photographer had died of natural causes, although hethought the news would in no way interest them. He said: "If it is necessary, I will speak to theGovernor." The inspector, a serious and humble civil servant, knew that the Doctor's sense of civicduty exasperated even his closest friends, and he was surprised at the ease with which he skippedover legal formalities in order to expedite the burial. The only thing he was not willing to do wasspeak to the Archbishop so that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could be buried in holy ground. Theinspector, astonished at his own impertinence, attempted to make excuses for him.

"I understood this man was a saint," he said.

"Something even rarer," said Dr. Urbino. "An atheistic saint. But those are matters for God todecide."In the distance, on the other side of the colonial city, the bells of the Cathedral were ringingfor High Mass. Dr. Urbino put on his half-moon glasses with the gold rims and consulted thewatch on its chain, slim, elegant, with the cover that opened at a touch: he was about to missPentecost Mass.

In the parlour was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with picturesof children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday.

Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen thegradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in thegallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future city, governed and corrupted by thoseunknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.

On the desk, next to a jar that held several old sea dog's pipes, was the chessboard with anunfinished game. Despite his haste and his sombre mood, Dr. Urbino could not resist thetemptation to study it. He knew it was the previous night's game, for Jeremiah de Saint-Amourplayed at dusk every day of the week with at least three different opponents, but he alwaysfinished every game and then placed the board and chessmen in their box and stored the box in adesk drawer. The Doctor knew he played with the white pieces and that this time it was evident hewas going to be defeated without mercy in four moves. "If there had been a crime, this would be agood clue," Urbino said to himself. "I know only one man capable of devising this masterful trap."If his life depended on it, he had to find out later why that indomitable soldier, accustomed tofighting to the last drop of blood, had left the final battle of his life unfinished.

At six that morning, as he was making his last rounds, the night watchman had seen the notenailed to the street door: Come in without knocking and inform the police. A short while later theinspector arrived with the intern, and the two of them had searched the house for some evidencethat might contradict the unmistakable breath of bitter almonds. But in the brief minutes theDoctor needed to study the unfinished game, the inspector discovered an envelope among thepapers on the desk, addressed to Dr. Juvenal Urbino and sealed with so much sealing wax that ithad to be ripped to pieces to get the letter out. The Doctor opened the black curtain over thewindow to have more light, gave a quick glance at the eleven sheets covered on both sides by adiligent handwriting, and when he had read the first paragraph he knew that he would missPentecost Communion. He read with agitated breath, turning back on several pages to find thethread he had lost, and when he finished he seemed to return from very far away and very longago. His despondency was obvious despite his effort to control it: his lips were as blue as thecorpse and he could not stop the trembling of his fingers as he refolded the letter and placed it inhis vest pocket. Then he remembered the inspector and the young doctor, and he smiled at themthrough the mists of grief.

"Nothing in particular," he said. "His final instructions."It was a half-truth, but they thought it complete because he ordered them to lift a loose tilefrom the floor, where they found a worn account book that contained the combination to thestrongbox. There was not as much money as they expected, but it was more than enough for thefuneral expenses and to meet other minor obligations. Then Dr. Urbino realised that he could notget to the Cathedral before the Gospel reading.

"It's the third time I've missed Sunday Mass since I've had the use of my reason," he said.

"But God understands."So he chose to spend a few minutes more and attend to all the details, although he couldhardly bear his intense longing to share the secrets of the letter with his wife. He promised tonotify the numerous Caribbean refugees who lived in the city in case they wanted to pay their lastrespects to the man who had conducted himself as if he were the most respectable of them all, the most active and the most radical, even after it had become all too clear that he had beenoverwhelmed by the burden of disillusion. He would also inform his chess partners, who rangedfrom distinguished professional men to nameless labourers, as well as other, less intimateacquaintances who might perhaps wish to attend the funeral. Before he read the posthumous letterhe had resolved to be first among them, but afterward he was not certain of anything. In any case,he was going to send a wreath of gardenias in the event that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour hadrepented at the last moment. The burial would be at five, which was the most suitable hour duringthe hottest months. If they needed him, from noon on he would be at the country house of Dr. L醕ides Olivella, his beloved disciple, who was celebrating his silver anniversary in the professionwith a formal luncheon that day.

Once the stormy years of his early struggles were over, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had followed a setroutine and achieved a respectability and prestige that had no equal in the province. He arose atthe crack of dawn, when he began to take his secret medicines: potassium bromide to raise hisspirits, salicylates for the ache in his bones when it rained, ergosterol drops for vertigo, belladonnafor sound sleep. He took something every hour, always in secret, because in his long life as adoctor and teacher he had always opposed prescribing palliatives for old age: it was easier for himto bear other people's pains than his own. In his pocket he always carried a little pad of camphorthat he inhaled deeply when no one was watching to calm his fear of so many medicines mixedtogether.

He would spend an hour in his study preparing for the class in general clinical medicine thathe taught at the Medical School every morning, Monday through Saturday, at eight o'clock, untilthe day before his death. He was also an avid reader of the latest books that his bookseller in Parismailed to him, or the ones from Barcelona that his local bookseller ordered for him, although hedid not follow Spanish literature as closely as French. In any case, he never read them in themorning, but only for an hour after his siesta and at night before he went to sleep. When he wasfinished in the study he did fifteen minutes of respiratory exercises in front of the open window inthe bathroom, always breathing toward the side where the roosters were crowing, which waswhere the air was new. Then he bathed, arranged his beard and waxed his moustache in anatmosphere saturated with genuine cologne from Farina Gegen眉 ber, and dressed in white linen,with a vest and a soft hat and cordovan boots. At eighty-one years of age he preserved the sameeasygoing manner and festive spirit that he had on his return from Paris soon after the greatcholera epidemic, and except for the metallic colour, his carefully combed hair with the centre partwas the same as it had been in his youth. He breakfasted en famille but followed his own personalregimen of an infusion of wormwood blossoms for his stomach and a head of garlic that he peeledand ate a clove at a time, chewing each one carefully with bread, to prevent heart failure. Afterclass it was rare for him not to have an appointment related to his civic initiatives, or his Catholicservice, or his artistic and social innovations.

He almost always ate lunch at home and had a ten-minute siesta on the terrace in the patio,hearing in his sleep the songs of the servant girls under the leaves of the mango trees, the cries ofvendors on the street, the uproar of oil and motors from the bay whose exhaust fumes flutteredthrough the house on hot afternoons like an angel condemned to putrefaction. Then he read hisnew books for an hour, above all novels and works of history, and gave lessons in French andsinging to the tame parrot who had been a local attraction for years. At four o'clock, after drinking a large glass of lemonade with ice, he left to call on his patients. In spite of his age he would notsee patients in his office and continued to care for them in their homes as he always had, since thecity was so domesticated that one could go anywhere in safety.

After he returned from Europe the first time, he used the family landau, drawn by two goldenchestnuts, but when this was no longer practical he changed it for a Victoria and a single horse,and he continued to use it, with a certain disdain for fashion, when carriages had already begun todisappear from the world and the only ones left in the city were for giving rides to tourists andcarrying wreaths at funerals. Although he refused to retire, he was aware that he was called in onlyfor hopeless cases, but he considered this a form of specialisation too. He could tell what waswrong with a patient just by looking at him, he grew more and more distrustful of patentmedicines, and he viewed with alarm the vulgarisation of surgery. He would say: "The scalpel isthe greatest proof of the failure of medicine." He thought that, in a strict sense, all medication waspoison and that seventy percent of common foods hastened death. "In any case," he would say inclass, "the little medicine we know is known only by a few doctors." From youthful enthusiasm hehad moved to a position that he himself defined as fatalistic humanism: "Each man is master of hisown death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain."But despite these extreme ideas, which were already part of local medical folklore, his formerpupils continued to consult him even after they were established in the profession, for theyrecognised in him what was called in those days a clinical eye. In any event, he was always anexpensive and exclusive doctor, and his patients were concentrated in the ancestral homes in theDistrict of the Viceroys.

His daily schedule was so methodical that his wife knew where to send him a message if anemergency arose in the course of the afternoon. When he was a young man he would stop in theParish Caf?before coming home, and this was where he perfected his chess game with his fatherin-law's cronies and some Caribbean refugees. But he had not returned to the Parish Caf?since thedawn of the new century, and he had attempted to organise national tournaments under thesponsorship of the Social Club. It was at this time that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour arrived, his kneesalready dead, not yet a photographer of children, yet in less than three months everyone who knewhow to move a bishop across a chessboard knew who he was, because no one had been able todefeat him in a game. For Dr. Juvenal Urbino it was a miraculous meeting, at the very momentwhen chess had become an unconquerable passion for him and he no longer had many opponentswho could satisfy it.

Thanks to him, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could become what he was among us. Dr. Urbinomade himself his unconditional protector, his guarantor in everything, without even taking thetrouble to learn who he was or what he did or what inglorious Avars he had come from in hiscrippled, broken state. He eventually lent him the money to set up his photography studio, andfrom the time he took his first picture of a child startled by the magnesium flash, Jeremiah deSaint-Amour paid back every last penny with religious regularity.

It was all for chess. At first they played after supper at seven o'clock, with a reasonablehandicap for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour because of his notable superiority, but the handicap wasreduced until at last they played as equals. Later, when Don Galileo Daconte opened the firstoutdoor cinema, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was one of his most dependable customers, and thegames of chess were limited to the nights when a new film was not being shown. By then he and the Doctor had become such good friends that they would go to see the films together, but neverwith the Doctor's wife, in part because she did not have the patience to follow the complicated plotlines, and in part because it always seemed to her, through sheer intuition, that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was not a good companion for anyone.

His Sundays were different. He would attend High Mass at the Cathedral and then returnhome to rest and read on the terrace in the patio. He seldom visited a patient on a holy day ofobligation unless it was of extreme urgency, and for many years he had not accepted a socialengagement that was not obligatory. On this Pentecost, in a rare coincidence, two extraordinaryevents had occurred: the death of a friend and the silver anniversary of an eminent pupil. Yetinstead of going straight home as he had intended after certifying the death of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he allowed himself to be carried along by curiosity.

As soon as he was in his carriage, he again consulted the posthumous letter and told thecoachman to take him to an obscure location in the old slave quarter. That decision was so foreignto his usual habits that the coachman wanted to make certain there was no mistake. No, nomistake: the address was clear and the man who had written it had more than enough reason toknow it very well. Then Dr. Urbino returned to the first page of the letter and plunged once againinto the flood of unsavoury revelations that might have changed his life, even at his age, if hecould have convinced himself that they were not the ravings of a dying man.

The sky had begun to threaten very early in the day and the weather was cloudy and cool, butthere was no chance of rain before noon. In his effort to find a shorter route, the coachman bravedthe rough cobblestones of the colonial city and had to stop often to keep the horse from beingfrightened by the rowdiness of the religious societies and fraternities coming back from thePentecost liturgy. The streets were full of paper garlands, music, flowers, and girls with colouredparasols and muslin ruffles who watched the celebration from their balconies. In the Plaza of theCathedral, where the statue of The Liberator was almost hidden among the African palm trees andthe globes of the new streetlights, traffic was congested because Mass had ended, and not a seatwas empty in the venerable and noisy Parish Caf? Dr. Urbino's was the only horse-drawn carriage;it was distinguishable from the handful left in the city because the patent-leather roof was alwayskept polished, and it had fittings of bronze that would not be corroded by salt, and wheels andpoles painted red with gilt trimming like gala nights at the Vienna Opera. Furthermore, while themost demanding families were satisfied if their drivers had a clean shirt, he still required hiscoachman to wear livery of faded velvet and a top hat like a circus ringmaster's, which, more thanan anachronism, was thought to show a lack of compassion in the dog days of the Caribbeansummer.

Despite his almost maniacal love for the city and a knowledge of it superior to anyone's, Dr.

Juvenal Urbino had not often had reason as he did that Sunday to venture boldly into the tumult ofthe old slave quarter. The coachman had to make many turns and stop to ask directions severaltimes in order to find the house. As they passed by the marshes, Dr. Urbino recognised theiroppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases, which on so many insomniacdawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jasmine from the patio, and whichhe felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life. But thatpestilence so frequently idealised by nostalgia became an unbearable reality when the carriagebegan to lurch through the quagmire of the streets where buzzards fought over the slaughterhouse offal as it was swept along by the receding tide. Unlike the city of the Viceroys where the houseswere made of masonry, here they were built of weathered boards and zinc roofs, and most of themrested on pilings to protect them from the flooding of the open sewers that had been inherited fromthe Spaniards. Everything looked wretched and desolate, but out of the sordid taverns came thethunder of riotous music, the godless drunken celebration of Pentecost by the poor. By the timethey found the house, gangs of ragged children were chasing the carriage and ridiculing thetheatrical finery of the coachman, who had to drive them away with his whip. Dr. Urbino,prepared for a confidential visit, realised too late that there was no innocence more dangerous thanthe innocence of age.

The exterior of the unnumbered house was in no way distinguishable from its less fortunateneighbours, except for the window with lace curtains and an imposing front door taken from someold church. The coachman pounded the door knocker, and only when he had made certain that itwas the right house did he help the Doctor out of the carriage. The door opened without a sound,and in the shadowy interior stood a mature woman dressed in black, with a red rose behind her ear.

Despite her age, which was no less than forty, she was still a haughty mulatta with cruel goldeneyes and hair tight to her skull like a helmet of steel wool. Dr. Urbino did not recognise her,although he had seen her several times in the gloom of the chess games in the photographer'sstudio, and he had once written her a prescription for tertian fever. He held out his hand and shetook it between hers, less in greeting than to help him into the house. The parlour had the climateand invisible murmur of a forest glade and was crammed with furniture and exquisite objects, eachin its natural place. Dr. Urbino recalled without bitterness an antiquarian's shop, No .26 rueMontmartre in Paris, on an autumn Monday in the last century. The woman sat down across fromhim and spoke in accented Spanish.

"This is your house, Doctor," she said. "I did not expect you so soon."Dr. Urbino felt betrayed. He stared at her openly, at her intense mourning, at the dignity ofher grief, and then he understood that this was a useless visit because she knew more than he didabout everything stated and explained in Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's posthumous letter. This wastrue. She had been with him until a very few hours before his death, as she had been with him forhalf his life, with a devotion and submissive tenderness that bore too close a resemblance to love,and without anyone knowing anything about it in this sleepy provincial capital where even statesecrets were common knowledge. They had met in a convalescent home in Port-au-Prince, whereshe had been born and where he had spent his early years as a fugitive, and she had followed himhere a year later for a brief visit, although both of them knew without agreeing to anything that shehad come to stay forever. She cleaned and straightened the laboratory once a week, but not eventhe most evil-minded neighbours confused appearance with reality because they, like everyoneelse, supposed that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's disability affected more than his capacity to walk.

Dr. Urbino himself supposed as much for solid medical reasons, and never would have believedhis friend had a woman if he himself had not revealed it in the letter. In any event, it was difficultfor him to comprehend that two free adults without a past and living on the fringes of a closedsociety's prejudices had chosen the hazards of illicit love. She explained: "It was his wish."Moreover, a clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which theyoften knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a condition to be despised. Onthe contrary: life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary.

On the previous night they had gone to the cinema, each one separately, and had sat apart asthey had done at least twice a month since the Italian immigrant, Don Galileo Daconte, hadinstalled his open-air theatre in the ruins of a seventeenth-century convent. They saw All Quiet onthe Western Front, a film based on a book that had been popular the year before and that Dr.

Urbino had read, his heart devastated by the barbarism of war. They met afterward in thelaboratory, she found him brooding and nostalgic, and thought it was because of the brutal scenesof wounded men dying in the mud. In an attempt to distract him, she invited him to play chess andhe accepted to please her, but he played inattentively, with the white pieces, of course, until hediscovered before she did that he was going to be defeated in four moves and surrendered withouthonour. Then the Doctor realised that she had been his opponent in the final game, and notGeneral Jer贸 nimo Argote, as he had supposed. He murmured in astonishment: "It wasmasterful!"She insisted that she deserved no praise, but rather that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, alreadylost in the mists of death, had moved his pieces without love. When he stopped the game at abouta quarter past eleven, for the music from the public dances had ended, he asked her to leave him.

He wanted to write a letter to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, whom he considered the most honourable manhe had ever known, and his soul's friend, as he liked to say, despite the fact that the only affinitybetween the two was their addiction to chess understood as a dialogue of reason and not as ascience. And then she knew that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had come to the end of his sufferingand that he had only enough life left to write the letter. The Doctor could not believe it.

"So then you knew!" he exclaimed.

She not only knew, she agreed, but she had helped him to endure the suffering as lovingly asshe had helped him to discover happiness. Because that was what his last eleven months had been:

cruel suffering.

"Your duty was to report him," said the Doctor.

"I could not do that," she said, shocked. "I loved him too much."Dr. Urbino, who thought he had heard everything, had never heard anything like that, andsaid with such simplicity. He looked straight at her and tried with all his senses to fix her in hismemory as she was at that moment: she seemed like a river idol, undaunted in her black dress,with her serpent's eyes and the rose behind her ear. A long time ago, on a deserted beach in Haitiwhere the two of them lay naked after love, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had sighed: "I will never beold." She interpreted this as a heroic determination to struggle without quarter against the ravagesof time, but he was more specific: he had made the irrevocable decision to take his own life whenhe was seventy years old.

He had turned seventy, in fact, on the twenty-third of January of that year, and then he had setthe date as the night before Pentecost, the most important holiday in a city consecrated to the cultof the Holy Spirit. There was not a single detail of the previous night that she had not known aboutahead of time, and they spoke of it often, suffering together the irreparable rush of days thatneither of them could stop now. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour loved life with a senseless passion, heloved the sea and love, he loved his dog and her, and as the date approached he had graduallysuccumbed to despair as if his death had been not his own decision but an inexorable destiny.

"Last night, when I left him, he was no longer of this world," she said.

She had wanted to take the dog with her, but he looked at the animal dozing beside the crutches and caressed him with the tips of his fingers. He said: "I'm sorry, but Mister WoodrowWilson is coming with me." He asked her to tie him to the leg of the cot while he wrote, and sheused a false knot so that he could free himself. That had been her only act of disloyalty, and it wasjustified by her desire to remember the master in the wintry eyes of his dog. But Dr. Urbinointerrupted her to say that the dog had not freed himself. She said: "Then it was because he did notwant to." And she was glad, because she preferred to evoke her dead lover as he had asked her tothe night before, when he stopped writing the letter he had already begun and looked at her for thelast time.

"Remember me with a rose," he said to her.

She had returned home a little after midnight. She lay down fully dressed on her bed, tosmoke one cigarette after another and give him time to finish what she knew was a long anddifficult letter, and a little before three o'clock, when the dogs began to howl, she put the water forcoffee on the stove, dressed in full mourning, and cut the first rose of dawn in the patio. Dr.

Urbino already realised how completely he would repudiate the memory of that irredeemablewoman, and he thought he knew why: only a person without principles could be so complaisanttoward grief.

And for the remainder of the visit she gave him even more justification. She would not go tothe funeral, for that is what she had promised her lover, although Dr. Urbino thought he had readjust the opposite in one of the paragraphs of the letter. She would not shed a tear, she would notwaste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory, she would not bury herselfalive inside these four walls to sew her shroud, as native widows were expected to do. Sheintended to sell Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's house and all its contents, which, according to theletter, now belonged to her, and she would go on living as she always had, without complaining, inthis death trap of the poor where she had been happy.

The words pursued Dr. Juvenal Urbino on the drive home: "this death trap of the poor." Itwas not a gratuitous description. For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: thesame burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowersrusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow agingamong withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours floodedthe latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds thattook the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air. On Saturdays the poormulattoes, along with all their domestic animals and kitchen utensils, tumultuously abandonedtheir hovels of cardboard and tin on the edges of the swamps and in jubilant assault took over therocky beaches of the colonial district. Until a few years ago, some of the older ones still bore theroyal slave brand that had been burned onto their chests with flaming irons. During the weekendthey danced without mercy, drank themselves blind on home-brewed alcohol, made wild loveamong the icaco plants, and on Sunday at midnight they broke up their own party with bloodyfree-for-alls. During the rest of the week the same impetuous mob swarmed into the plazas andalleys of the old neighbourhoods with their stores of everything that could be bought and sold, andthey infused the dead city with the frenzy of a human fair reeking of fried fish: a new life.

Independence from Spain and then the abolition of slavery precipitated the conditions ofhonourable decadence in which Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been born and raised. The great old families sank into their ruined palaces in silence. Along the rough cobbled streets that had servedso well in surprise attacks and buccaneer landings, weeds hung from the balconies and openedcracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions, and the only signs of life at twoo'clock in the afternoon were languid piano exercises played in the dim light of siesta. Indoors, inthe cool bedrooms saturated with incense, women protected themselves from the sun as if it werea shameful infection, and even at early Mass they hid their faces in their mantillas. Their loveaffairs were slow and difficult and were often disturbed by sinister omens, and life seemedinterminable. At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorousmosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred thecertainty of death in the depths of one's soul.

And so the very life of the colonial city, which the young Juvenal Urbino tended to idealise inhis Parisian melancholy, was an illusion of memory. In the eighteenth century, the commerce ofthe city had been the most prosperous in the Caribbean, owing in the main to the thanklessprivilege of its being the largest African slave market in the Americas. It was also the permanentresidence of the Viceroys of the New Kingdom of Granada, who preferred to govern here on theshores of the world's ocean rather than in the distant freezing capital under a centuries-old drizzlethat disturbed their sense of reality. Several times a year, fleets of galleons carrying the treasuresof Potos? Quito, and Veracruz gathered in the bay, and the city lived its years of glory. On Friday,June 8, 1708, at four o'clock in the afternoon, the galleon San Jos?set sail for C醖 iz with a cargoof precious stones and metals valued at five hundred billion pesos in the currency of the day; itwas sunk by an English squadron at the entrance to the port, and two long centuries later it had notyet been salvaged. That treasure lying in its bed of coral, and the corpse of the commander floatingsideways on the bridge, were evoked by historians as an emblem of the city drowned in memories.

Across the bay, in the residential district of La Manga, Dr. Juvenal Urbino's house stood inanother time. One-story, spacious and cool, it had a portico with Doric columns on the outsideterrace, which commanded a view of the still, miasmic water and the debris from sunken ships inthe bay. From the entrance door to the kitchen, the floor was covered with black and whitecheckerboard tiles, a fact often attributed to Dr. Urbino's ruling passion without taking intoaccount that this was a weakness common to the Catalonian craftsmen who built this district forthe nouveaux riches at the beginning of the century. The large drawing room had the very highceilings found throughout the rest of the house, and six full-length windows facing the street, andit was separated from the dining room by an enormous, elaborate glass door covered withbranching vines and bunches of grapes and maidens seduced by the pipes of fauns in a bronzegrove. The furnishings in the reception rooms, including the pendulum clock that stood like aliving sentinel in the drawing room, were all original English pieces from the late nineteenthcentury, and the lamps that hung from the walls were all teardrop crystal, and there were S猫vresvases and bowls everywhere and little alabaster statues of pagan idylls. But that Europeancoherence vanished in the rest of the house, where wicker armchairs were jumbled together withViennese rockers and leather footstools made by local craftsmen. Splendid hammocks from SanJacinto, with multicoloured fringe along the sides and the owner's name embroidered in Gothicletters with silk thread, hung in the bedrooms along with the beds. Next to the dining room, thespace that had originally been designed for gala suppers was used as a small music room forintimate concerts when famous performers came to the city. In order to enhance the silence, the tiles had been covered with the Turkish rugs purchased at the World's Fair in Paris; a recent modelof a victrola stood next to a stand that held records arranged with care, and in a corner, drapedwith a Manila shawl, was the piano that Dr. Urbino had not played for many years. Throughout thehouse one could detect the good sense and care of a woman whose feet were planted firmly on theground.

But no other room displayed the meticulous solemnity of the library, the sanctuary of Dr.

Urbino until old age carried him off. There, all around his father's walnut desk and the tuftedleather easy chairs, he had lined the walls and even the windows with shelves behind glass doors,and had arranged in an almost demented order the three thousand volumes bound in identicalcalfskin with his initials in gold on the spines. Unlike the other rooms, which were at the mercy ofnoise and foul winds from the port, the library always enjoyed the tranquillity and fragrance of anabbey. Born and raised in the Caribbean superstition that one opened doors and windows tosummon a coolness that in fact did not exist, Dr. Urbino and his wife at first felt their heartsoppressed by enclosure. But in the end they were convinced of the merits of the Roman strategyagainst heat, which consists of closing houses during the lethargy of August in order to keep outthe burning air from the street, and then opening them up completely to the night breezes. Andfrom that time on theirs was the coolest house under the furious La Manga sun, and it was adelight to take a siesta in the darkened bedrooms and to sit on the portico in the afternoon to watchthe heavy, ash-grey freighters from New Orleans pass by, and at dusk to see the wooden paddlesof the riverboats with their shining lights, purifying the stagnant garbage heap of the bay with thewake of their music. It was also the best protected from December through March, when thenorthern winds tore away roofs and spent the night circling like hungry wolves looking for a crackwhere they could slip in. No one ever thought that a marriage rooted in such foundations couldhave any reason not to be happy.

In any case, Dr. Urbino was not when he returned home that morning before ten o'clock,shaken by the two visits that not only had obliged him to miss Pentecost Mass but also threatenedto change him at an age when everything had seemed complete. He wanted a short siesta until itwas time for Dr. L醕 ides Olivella's gala luncheon, but he found the servants in an uproar as theyattempted to catch the parrot, who had flown to the highest branches of the mango tree when theytook him from his cage to clip his wings. He was a deplumed, maniacal parrot who did not speakwhen asked to but only when it was least expected, but then he did so with a clarity and rationalitythat were uncommon among human beings. He had been tutored by Dr. Urbino himself, whichafforded him privileges that no one else in the family ever had, not even the children when theywere young.

He had lived in the house for over twenty years, and no one knew how many years he hadbeen alive before then. Every afternoon after his siesta, Dr. Urbino sat with him on the terrace inthe patio, the coolest spot in the house, and he had summoned the most diligent reserves of hispassion for pedagogy until the parrot learned to speak French like an academician. Then, just forlove of the labour, he taught him the Latin accompaniment to the Mass and selected passages fromthe Gospel according to St. Matthew, and he tried without success to inculcate in him a workingnotion of the four arithmetic functions. On one of his last trips to Europe he brought back the firstphonograph with a trumpet speaker, along with many of the latest popular records as well as thoseby his favourite classical composers. Day after day, over and over again for several months, he played the songs of Yvette Guilbert and Aristide Bruant, who had charmed France during the lastcentury, until the parrot learned them by heart. He sang them in a woman's voice if they were hers,in a tenor's voice if they were his, and ended with impudent laughter that was a masterful imitationof the servant girls when they heard him singing in French. The fame of his accomplishments wasso widespread that on occasion distinguished visitors who had travelled from the interior on theriverboats would ask permission to see him, and once some of the many English tourists, who inthose days sailed the banana boats from New Orleans, would have bought him at any price. Butthe day of his greatest glory was when the President of the Republic, Don Marco Fidel Su醨 ez,with his entourage of cabinet ministers, visited the house in order to confirm the truth of hisreputation. They arrived at about three o'clock in the afternoon, suffocating in the top hats andfrock coats they had worn during three days of official visits under the burning August sky, andthey had to leave as curious as when they arrived, because for two desperate hours the parrotrefused to say a single syllable, ignoring the pleas and threats and public humiliation of Dr.

Urbino, who had insisted on that foolhardy invitation despite the sage warnings of his wife.

The fact that the parrot could maintain his privileges after that historic act of defiance was theultimate proof of his sacred rights. No other animal was permitted in the house, with the exceptionof the land turtle who had reappeared in the kitchen after three or four years, when everyonethought he was lost forever. He, however, was not considered a living being but rather a mineralgood luck charm whose location one could never be certain of. Dr. Urbino was reluctant to confesshis hatred of animals, which he disguised with all kinds of scientific inventions and philosophicalpretexts that convinced many, but not his wife. He said that people who loved them to excess werecapable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile,that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws weresimply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust,and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

On the other hand, Fermina Daza, his wife, who at that time was seventy-two years old andhad already lost the doe's gait of her younger days, was an irrational idolater of tropical flowersand domestic animals, and early in her marriage she had taken advantage of the novelty of love tokeep many more of them in the house than good sense would allow. The first were threeDalmatians named after Roman emperors, who fought for the favours of a female who did honourto her name of Messalina, for it took her longer to give birth to nine pups than to conceive anotherten. Then there were Abyssinian cats with the profiles of eagles and the manners of pharaohs,cross-eyed Siamese and palace Persians with orange eyes, who walked through the rooms likeshadowy phantoms and shattered the night with the howling of their witches' sabbaths of love. Forseveral years an Amazonian monkey, chained by his waist to the mango tree in the patio, elicited acertain compassion because he had the sorrowful face of Archbishop Obdulio y Rey, the samecandid eyes, the same eloquent hands; that, however, was not the reason Fermina got rid of him,but because he had the bad habit of pleasuring himself in honour of the ladies.

There were all kinds of Guatemalan birds in cages along the passageways, and premonitorycurlews, and swamp herons with long yellow legs, and a young stag who came in through thewindows to eat the anthurium in the flowerpots. Shortly before the last civil war, when there wastalk for the first time of a possible visit by the Pope, they had brought a bird of paradise fromGuatemala, but it took longer to arrive than to return to its homeland when it was learned that the announcement of the pontifical visit had been a lie spread by the government to alarm theconspiratorial Liberals. Another time, on the smugglers' ships from Cura莽 ao, they bought awicker cage with six perfumed crows identical to the ones that Fermina Daza had kept as a girl inher father's house and that she still wanted to have as a married woman. But no one could bear thecontinual flapping of their wings that filled the house with the reek of funeral wreaths. They alsobrought in an anaconda, four meters long, whose insomniac hunter's sighs disturbed the darknessin the bedrooms although it accomplished what they had wanted, which was to frighten with itsmortal breath the bats and salamanders and countless species of harmful insects that invaded thehouse during the rainy months. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, so occupied at that time with his professionalobligations and so absorbed in his civic and cultural enterprises, was content to assume that in themidst of so many abominable creatures his wife was not only the most beautiful woman in theCaribbean but also the happiest. But one rainy afternoon, at the end of an exhausting day, heencountered a disaster in the house that brought him to his senses. Out of the drawing room, andfor as far as the eye could see, a stream of dead animals floated in a marsh of blood. The servantgirls had climbed on the chairs, not knowing what to do, and they had not yet recovered from thepanic of the slaughter.

One of the German mastiffs, maddened by a sudden attack of rabies, had torn to pieces everyanimal of any kind that crossed its path, until the gardener from the house next door found thecourage to face him and hack him to pieces with his machete. No one knew how many creatureshe had bitten or contaminated with his green slaverings, and so Dr. Urbino ordered the survivorskilled and their bodies burned in an isolated field, and he requested the services of MisericordiaHospital for a thorough disinfecting of the house. The only animal to escape, because nobodyremembered him, was the giant lucky charm tortoise.

Fermina Daza admitted for the first time that her husband was right in a domestic matter, andfor a long while afterward she was careful to say no more about animals. She consoled herselfwith colour illustrations from Linnaeus's Natural History, which she framed and hung on thedrawing room walls, and perhaps she would eventually have lost all hope of ever seeing an animalin the house again if it had not been for the thieves who, early one morning, forced a bathroomwindow and made off 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 ironcrossbars, placed his most valuable possessions in the strongbox, and belatedly acquired thewartime habit of sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. But he opposed the purchase of a fiercedog, vaccinated or unvaccinated, running loose or chained up, even if thieves were to stealeverything 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 againdetermined to buy a dog, and he never imagined that his hasty generalisation was to cost him hislife. Fermina Daza, whose straightforward character had become more subtle with the years,seized on her husband's casual words, and months after the robbery she returned to the ships fromCura莽 ao and bought a royal Paramaribo parrot, who knew only the blasphemies of sailors butsaid 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, the onlyway 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 surprisedat 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 feathers drenched, heuttered phrases from another time, which he could not have learned in the house and which ledone to think that he was much older than he appeared. The Doctor's final doubts collapsed onenight when the thieves tried to get in again through a skylight in the attic, and the parrot frightenedthem with a mastiff's barking that could not have been more realistic if it had been real, and withshouts of stop thief stop thief stop thief, two saving graces he had not learned in the house. It wasthen that Dr. Urbino took charge of him and ordered the construction of a perch under the mangotree with a container for water, another for ripe bananas, and a trapeze for acrobatics. FromDecember through March, when the nights were cold and the north winds made living outdoorsunbearable, he was taken inside to sleep in the bedrooms in a cage covered by a blanket, althoughDr. Urbino suspected that his chronic swollen glands might be a threat to the healthy respiration ofhumans. For many years they clipped his wing feathers and let him wander wherever he chose towalk with his hulking old horseman's gait. But one day he began to do acrobatic tricks on thebeams in the kitchen and fell into the pot of stew with a sailor's shout of every man for himself,and with such good luck that the cook managed to scoop him out with the ladle, scalded anddeplumed but still alive. From then on he was kept in the cage even during the daytime, indefiance of the vulgar belief that caged parrots forget everything they have learned, and let outonly in the four o'clock coolness for his classes with Dr. Urbino on the terrace in the patio. No onerealised in time that his wings were too long, and they were about to clip them that morning whenhe escaped to the top of the mango tree.

And for three hours they had not been able to catch him. The servant girls, with the help ofother maids in the neighbourhood, had used all kinds of tricks to lure him down, but he insisted onstaying where he was, laughing madly as he shouted long live the Liberal Party, long live theLiberal Party damn it, a reckless cry that had cost many a carefree drunk his life. Dr. Urbino couldbarely see him amid the leaves, and he tried to cajole him in Spanish and French and even inLatin, and the parrot responded in the same languages and with the same emphasis and timbre inhis voice, but he did not move from his treetop. Convinced that no one was going to make himmove voluntarily, Dr. Urbino had them send for the fire department, his most recent civic pastime.

Until just a short time before, in fact, fires had been put out by volunteers using brickmasons'

ladders and buckets of water carried in from wherever it could be found, and methods sodisorderly that they sometimes caused more damage than the fires. But for the past year, thanks toa fund-organised by the Society for Public Improvement, of which Juvenal Urbino was honorarypresident, there was a corps of professional firemen and a water truck with a siren and a bell andtwo high-pressure hoses. They were so popular that classes were suspended when the church bellswere heard sounding the alarm, so that children could watch them fight the fire. At first that wasall they did. But Dr. Urbino told the municipal authorities that in Hamburg he had seen firemenrevive a boy found frozen in a basement after a three-day snowstorm. He had also seen them in aNeapolitan alley lowering a corpse in his coffin from a tenth-floor balcony because the stairway inthe building had so many twists and turns that the family could not get him down to the street.

That was how the local firemen learned to render other emergency services, such as forcing locksor killing poisonous snakes, and the Medical School offered them a special course in first aid for minor accidents. So it was in no way peculiar to ask them to please get a distinguished parrot, withall the qualities of a gentleman, out of a tree. Dr. Urbino said: "Tell them it's for me." And he wentto his bedroom to dress for the gala luncheon. The truth was that at that moment, devastated by theletter from Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he did not really care about the fate of the parrot.

Fermina Daza had put on a loose-fitting silk dress belted at the hip, a necklace of real pearlswith six long, uneven loops, and high-heeled satin shoes that she wore only on very solemnoccasions, for by now she was too old for such abuses. Her stylish attire did not seem appropriatefor a venerable grandmother, but it suited her figure--long-boned and still slender and erect, herresilient hands without a single age spot, her steel-blue hair bobbed on a slant at her cheek. Herclear almond eyes and her inborn haughtiness were all that were left to her from her weddingportrait, but what she had been deprived of by age she more than made up for in character anddiligence. She felt very well: the time of iron corsets, bound waists, and bustles that exaggeratedbuttocks was receding into the past. Liberated bodies, breathing freely, showed themselves forwhat they were. Even at the age of seventy-two.

Dr. Urbino found her sitting at her dressing table under the slow blades of the electric fan,putting on her bell-shaped hat decorated with felt violets. The bedroom was large and bright, withan English bed protected by mosquito netting embroidered in pink, and two windows open to thetrees in the patio, where one could hear the clamour of cicadas, giddy with premonitions of rain.

Ever since their return from their honeymoon, Fermina Daza had chosen her husband's clothesaccording to the weather and the occasion, and laid them out for him on a chair the night before sothey would be ready for him when he came out of the bathroom. She could not remember whenshe had also begun to help him dress, and finally to dress him, and she was aware that at first shehad done it for love, but for the past five years or so she had been obliged to do it regardless of thereason because he could not dress himself. They had just celebrated their golden weddinganniversary, and they were not capable of living for even an instant without the other, or withoutthinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased. Neither could havesaid if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked thequestion with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know theanswer. Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his moodchanges, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did notidentify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.

That was why she did not treat him like a difficult old man but as a senile baby, and that deceptionwas providential for the two of them because it put them beyond the reach of pity.

Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that itwas easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they hadlearned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. Foryears Fermina Daza had endured her husband's jubilant dawns with a bitter heart. She clung to thelast threads of sleep in order to avoid facing the fatality of another morning full of sinisterpremonitions, while he awoke with the innocence of a newborn: each new day was one more dayhe had won. She heard him awake with the roosters, and his first sign of life was a cough withoutrhyme or reason that seemed intended to awaken her too. She heard him grumble, just to annoyher, while he felt around for the slippers that were supposed to be next to the bed. She heard himmake his way to the bathroom, groping in the dark. After an hour in his study, when she had fallen asleep again, he would come back to dress, still without turning on the light. Once, during a partygame, he had been asked how he defined himself, and he had said: "I am a man who dresses in thedark." She heard him, knowing full well that not one of those noises was indispensable, and thathe made them on purpose although he pretended not to, just as she was awake and pretended notto be. His motives were clear: he never needed her awake and lucid as much as he did during thosefumbling moments.

There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and herhand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed thesensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was. Dr. Urbino knew she waswaiting for his slightest sound, that she even would be grateful for it, just so she could blamesomeone for waking her at five o'clock in the morning, so that on the few occasions when he hadto feel around in the dark because he could not find his slippers in their customary place, shewould suddenly say in a sleepy voice: "You left them in the bathroom last night." Then right afterthat, her voice fully awake with rage, she would curse: "The worst misfortune in this house is thatnobody lets you sleep."Then she would roll over in bed and turn on the light without the least mercy for herself,content with her first victory of the day. The truth was they both played a game, mythical andperverse, but for all that comforting: it was one of the many dangerous pleasures of domestic love.

But one of those trivial games almost ended the first thirty years of their life together, because oneday there was no soap in the bathroom.

It began with routine simplicity. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had returned to the bedroom, in the dayswhen he still bathed without help, and begun to dress without turning on the light. As usual shewas in her warm foetal state, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow, that arm from a sacred danceabove her head. But she was only half asleep, as usual, and he knew it. After a prolonged sound ofstarched linen in the darkness, Dr. Urbino said to himself: "I've been bathing for almost a weekwithout any soap."Then, fully awake, she remembered, and tossed and turned in fury with the world because infact she had forgotten to replace the soap in the bathroom. She had noticed its absence three daysearlier when she was already under the shower, and she had planned to replace it afterward, butthen she forgot until the next day, and on the third day the same thing happened again. The truthwas that a week had not gone by, as he said to make her feel more guilty, but three unpardonabledays, and her anger at being found out in a mistake maddened her. As always, she defended herselfby attacking.

"Well I've bathed every day," she shouted, beside herself with rage, "and there's always beensoap."Although he knew her battle tactics by heart, this time he could not abide them. On someprofessional pretext or other he went to live in the interns' quarters at Misericordia Hospital,returning home only to change his clothes before making his evening house calls. She headed forthe kitchen when she heard him come in, pretending that she had something to do, and stayedthere until she heard his carriage in the street. For the next three months, each time they tried toresolve the conflict they only inflamed their feelings even more. He was not ready to come back aslong as she refused to admit there had been no soap in the bathroom, and she was not prepared tohave him back until he recognised that he had consciously lied to torment her.

The incident, of course, gave them the opportunity to evoke many other trivial quarrels frommany other dim and turbulent dawns. Resentments stirred up other resentments, reopened oldscars, turned them into fresh wounds, and both were dismayed at the desolating proof that in somany years of conjugal battling they had done little more than nurture their rancour. At last heproposed that they both submit to an open confession, with the Archbishop himself if necessary, sothat God could decide once and for all whether or not there had been soap in the soap dish in thebathroom. Then, despite all her self-control, she lost her temper with a historic cry: "To hell withthe Archbishop!"The impropriety shook the very foundations of the city, gave rise to slanders that were noteasy to disprove, and was preserved in popular tradition as if it were a line from an operetta: "Tohell with the Archbishop!" Realising she had gone too far, she anticipated her husband'spredictable response and threatened to move back to her father's old house, which still belonged toher although it had been rented out for public offices, and live there by herself. And it was not anidle threat: she really did want to leave and did not care about the scandal, and her husbandrealised 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 continuedto live in the same house with her, although they slept in separate rooms, and he did not say aword to her. They ate in silence, sparring with so much skill that they sent each other messagesacross the table through the children, and the children never realised that they were