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

rational possibility. The Center for the Arts, which was also his idea, established the School of Fine Arts in the same house where it is still located, and for many years he was a patron of the Poetic Festival in April.
    Only he achieved what had seemed impossible for at least a century: the restoration of the Dramatic Theater, which had been used as a henhouse and a breeding farm for game cocks since colonial times. It was the culmination of a spectacular civic campaign that involved every sector of the city in a multitudinous mobilization that many thought worthy of a better cause. In any event, the new DramaticTheater was inaugurated when it still lacked seats or lights, and the audience had to bring their own chairs and their own lightingfor the intermissions. The same protocol held sway as at the great performances in Europe, and the ladies used the occasion to show off their long dresses and their fur coats in the dog days of the Caribbean summer, but it was also necessary to authorize the admissionof servants to carry the chairs and lamps and all the things to eat that were deemed necessary to survive the interminable programs, one of which did not end until it was time for early Mass. The season opened with a French opera company whose novelty was a harp in the orchestra and whose unforgettable glory was the impeccable voice and dramatic talent of a Turkish soprano who sang barefoot andwore rings set with precious stones on her toes. After the first act the stage could barely be seen and the singers lost their voices because of the smoke from so many palm oil lamps, but the chroniclers of the city were very careful to delete these minor inconveniences and to magnify the memorable events. Without a doubt it was Dr. Urbino’s most contagious initiative, for opera fever infectedthe most surprising elements in the city and gave rise to a whole generation of Isoldes and Otellos and Aïdas and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermissions.
    Dr. Juvenal Urbino never accepted the public positions that were offered to him with frequencyand without conditions, and he was a pitiless critic of those physicians who used their professional prestige to attain political office. Although he was always considered a Liberal and was in the habit of voting for that party’s candidates, it was more a question of tradition than conviction, and he was perhaps the last member of the great families who still knelt in the street when the Archbishop’scarriage drove by. He defined himself as a natural pacifist, a partisan of definitive reconciliation between Liberals and Conservatives for the good of the nation. But his public conduct was so autonomous that no group claimed him for its own: the Liberals considered him a Gothic troglodyte, the Conservatives said he was almost a Mason, and the Masons repudiated him as a secret cleric in theservice of the Holy See. His less savage critics thought he was just an aristocrat enraptured by the delights of the Poetic Festival while the nation bled to death in an endless civil war.
    Only two of his actions did not seem to conform to this image.The first was his leaving the former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, which had been the family mansion for over a century, and moving to anew house in a neighborhood of 
nouveaux riches
. The other was his marriage to a beauty from the lower classes, without name or fortune, whom the ladies with long last names ridiculed in secret until they were forced to admit that she outshone them all in distinction and character. Dr. Urbino was always acutely aware of these and many other cracks in his public image, and no one was as consciousas he of being the last to bear a family name on its way to extinction. His children were two undistinguished ends of a line. After fifty years, his son, Marco Aurelio, a doctor like himself