AT THE AGE of twe, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been the most desirable of bachelors. He had returned from a long stay in Paris, where he had pleted advaudies in medie and surgery, and from the time he set foot on solid ground he gave over-whelming indications that he had not wasted a minute of his time. He returned more fastidious than when he left, more in trol of his nature, and none of his poraries seemed as rigorous and as learned as he in his sce, and none could dater to the music of the day or improvise as well on the piano. Seduced by his personal charms and by the certainty of his family fortuhe girls in his circle held secret lotteries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled, too, on being with them, but he mao keep himself in a state of grace, intad tempting, until he succumbed without resistao the plebeian charms of Fermina Daza.
He liked to say that this love was the result of a ical error. He himself could not believe that it had happened, least of all at that time in his life when all his reserves of passion were trated on the destiny of his city which, he said with great frequend no sed thoughts, had no equal in the world. In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happihan those golden after-noons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kissing on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exge all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that the heart』s memory elimihe bad and maghe good, and that thanks to this artifice we mao ehe burden of the past. But wheood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the ial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balies, only then did he uand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.
The ship made its way across the bay through a floating bla of drowned animals, and most of the passee in their s to escape the stench. The young doctor walked down the gangplank dressed in perfect alpaca, wearing a vest and dustcoat, with the beard of a young Pasteur and his hair divided by a , pale part, and with enough self-trol to hide the lump in his throat caused not by terror but by sadness. On the nearly deserted dock guarded by barefoot soldiers without uniforms, his sisters and mother were waiting for him, along with his closest friends, whom he found insipid and without expectatioe their sophisticated airs; they spoke about the crisis of the civil war as if it were remote and fn, but they all had an evasive tremor in their voices and an uainty in their eyes that belied their words. His mother moved him most of all. She was still young, a woman who had made a mark on life with her elegand social drive, but who was now slowly withering in the aroma of camphor that rose from her widow』s crepe. She must have seen herself in her son』s fusion, and she asked in immediate self-defense why his skin ale as wax.
「It』s life over there, Mother,」 he said. 「You turn green in Paris.」
A short while later, suffog with the heat as he sat o her in the closed carriage, he could no longer ehe unmerciful reality that came p in through the window. The o looked like ashes, the old palaces of the marquises were about to succu