Until August

by Gabriel García Márquez

“Memory is at once my source material and my tool. Without it, there’s nothing.”

The world changed with her first sip. She felt mischievous, joyful, capable of anything, and beautified by the sacred mixture of music and gin.

Only when she picked up her book from the bedside table to put it in her bag did she notice that he had left between its pages of horror a twenty-dollar bill.

However, it would take several days before Ana Magdalena became aware that the changes were not to the world but to herself. She had always gone through life without looking at it, and only that year upon her return from the island did she begin to see it with chastened eyes.

She did not know whether to frame it as a trophy or tear it to shreds to exorcise the indignity. The only thing that seemed indecent was to spend it.

She never worried about finding out who he was, or even tried, until some three years after that brutal night, when she recognized him on television in a composite sketch of a sad vampire sought by police forces all over the Caribbean: a swindler who pimped helpless widows, the probable murderer of two of them.

“Anything I find out about you is your fault.”

But she felt a little lost, for he seemed to be talking not so much to speak as to hide.

Then she made herself comfortable in the bed, without changing her clothes or switching off the lights, and cried herself to sleep furious with herself for the misfortune of being a woman in a man’s world.