FERMINA DAZA could not have imagihat her letter, in-spired by blind rage, would have been interpreted by Florentino Ariza as a love letter. She had put into it all the fury of which she was capable, her crudest words, the most wounding, most unjust vilifica-tions, which still seemed minuscule to her in light of the enormity of the offe was the final a a bitter exorcism through which she was attempting to e to terms with her new situation. She wao be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a tury of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity. She was a ghost in a strange house that ht had bee immense and solitary and through which she wandered with-out purpose, asking herself in anguish which of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.
She could not avoid a profound feeling of rancor toward her hus-band for havi her alone in the middle of the o. Everything of his made her cry: his pajamas uhe pillow, his slippers that had always looked to her like an invalid』s, the memory of his image in the back of the mirror as he undressed while she bed her hair before bed, the odor of his skin, which was to linger on hers for a long time after his death. She would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing and slap herself on the forehead because she suddenly remembered something she had fotten to tell him. At every moment tless ordinary questions would e to mind that he alone could answer for her. Once he had told her something that she could not imagihat amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches, in the leg that is no lohere. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
When she awoke on her first m as a widow, she turned over in bed without opening her eyes, searg for a more fort-able position so that she could tinue sleeping, and that was the moment when he died for her. For only then did it bee clear that he had spent the night away from home for the first time in years. The other place where this struck her was at the table, not because she felt alone, whi fact she was, but because of her strange belief that she was eating with someone who no longer existed. It was not until her daughter Ofelia came from New Orleans with her husband and the three girls that she sat at a table again to eat, but instead of the usual one, she ordered a smaller, improvised table set up in the corridor. Until then she did not take a regular meal.
She would walk through the kit at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork is a a little of everything without plag anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt fortable, the ones she got along with best. Still, no matter how hard she tried, she could not elude the presence of her dead husband: wherever she went, wherever she turned, no matter what she was doing, she would e across something of his that would remind her of him. For even though it seemed only det and right to grieve for him, she also wao do everything possible not to wallow in her grief. And so she made the drastic decision to empty the house of everything that would remind her of her dead husband, which was the only way she could think of to go on living without him.
It was a ritual of eradication. Her son agreed to take his library so that she could repla