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“Each man is master of his own death, and all that we
can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.”
threatened to change him at an age when everything had seemed complete.
Like
she helped him put on his undershorts with as much love as if they had been a diaper,
Love
it seemed to her a heartbreaking proof of love that she had helped him carry out his decision to die. She said: “If you also decided to do that for reasons as serious as his, my duty would be to do what she did.”
Love
is a pity to still find a suicide that is not
Love
who might never again be happy outside their portraits and in whose hands lay the future of the city.
age was an indecent state that had to be ended before it was too late.
Age
what worried Dr. Urbino most about dying was the solitary life Fermina Daza would lead without him.
Love
The house was under the rule of death.
Age
She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past.
Love
It was he who imposed order in the crowded kitchens so that there would be enough coffee. He found additional chairs when the neighbors’ proved insufficient, and he ordered the extra wreaths to be put in the patio when there was no more room in the house.
New love
He was the only one who knew how to react when the fugitive parrot appeared in the dining room at midnight with his head high and his wings spread, which caused a stupefied shudder to run through the house, for it seemed a sign of repentance. Florentino Ariza seized him by the neck before he had time to shout any of his witless stock phrases, and he carried him to the stable in a covered cage.
Symbolism of captured love
He had changed into a black frock coat of the kind worn only for funerals and the offices of Holy Week, a wing collar with an artist’s bow instead of a tie, and a bowler hat.
Allusion to painting of juvenals death
She was pleased, because for many years she had erased him from her life, and this was the first time she saw him clearly, purified by forgetfulness.
Purified for good or for bad?
the only feeling that Florentino Ariza inspired in her was a certain pity, because it seemed to her that he was sick.
Sick
yellow leaves
Yellow
bird shook himself among the leaves of the almond trees, and his droppings fell right on the embroidery.
Bird
Then he offered her the camellia he wore in his lapel. She refused: “It is a flower of promises.”
Flower
he lost his voice and his appetite and spent the entire night tossing and turning in his bed.
Sick
a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a transient hotel for sailors.
Bird
Florentino Ariza, because he was so quiet and elusive, also earned the esteem of the owner, and during the most arduous period of his grief he would lock himself in the suffocating little rooms to read verses and tearful serialized love stories, and his reveries left nests of dark swallows on the balconies and the sound of kisses and the beating of wings in the stillness of siesta.
Bird
This was the time when he gave in to his desire to eat the gardenias that Tránsito Ariza grew in pots in the patio, so that he could know the taste of Fermina Daza.
Flowers Sex
almond trees
Unrequited?
Florentino Ariza spent the rest of the afternoon eating roses and reading the note letter by letter,
Flowers
Desperate to infect her with his own madness, he sent her miniaturist’s verses inscribed with the point of a pin on camellia petals.
Flowers
The cards said there was no obstacle in her future to a long and happy marriage, and that prediction gave her back her courage because she could not conceive of such a fortunate destiny with any man other than the one she loved.
“No, please,” she said to him. “Forget it.”
Love?
He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
Memory
curlew that had come in through a half-closed door sang every hour on the hour in his bedroom.
Bird & inescapable passage of time
That is how they were: they spent their lives proclaiming their proud origins, the historic merits of the city, the value of its relics, its heroism, its beauty, but they were blind to the decay of the years. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, on the other hand, loved it enough to see it with the eyes of truth.
Until then Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family had conceived of death as a misfortune that befell others, other people’s fathers and mothers, other people’s brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs.
Mortality
tried to find the street door but lost his way, and in his confusion he knocked into the cage with the perfumed crows. They broke into sordid shrieking, flapped their wings in fright, and saturated the Doctor’s clothing with a feminine fragrance.
Birds - fermina
in his dream he began to hear funeral bells. First he heard those of the Cathedral and then he heard those of all the other churches, one after another, even the cracked pots of St. Julian the Hospitaler. “Shit,” he murmured in his sleep, “the dead have died.”
Foreshadowing
one rainy afternoon when Fermina Daza dreamed that Juvenal Urbino had returned to the house to give her the tongue depressor he had used to examine her throat. In the dream, the tongue depressor was made not of aluminum but of a delicious metal that she had tasted with pleasure in other dreams, so that she broke it in two unequal pieces and gave him the smaller one.
Allusion
golden oriole’s
Bird
He played, murmuring the words, his violin bathed in tears, with an inspiration so intense that with the first measures the dogs on the street and then the dogs all over the city began to howl, but then, little by little, they were quieted by the spell of the music, and the waltz ended in supernatural silence.
Magic
regarding his chronic constipation: “The world is divided into those who can shit and those who cannot.” On the basis of this dogma the Doctor had elaborated an entire theory of character, which he considered more accurate than astrology. But with what he had learned over the years, Florentino Ariza stated it another way:
Constipation - cant let go, somewhat full of it
Once he tasted some chamomile tea and sent it back, saying only: “This stuff tastes of window.” Both she and the servants were surprised because they had never heard of anyone who had drunk boiled window, but when they tried the tea in an effort to understand, they understood: it did taste of window.
Love
Taken together, they marked the passage of his life, for he experienced the cruelty of time not so much in his own flesh as in the imperceptible changes he discerned in Fermina Daza each time he saw her.
Aging
The others, the married women, the mothers, the widows, the grandmothers, were a race apart who tallied their age not in relation to the number of years they had lived but
in relation to the time left to them before they died.
Age
When he was a boy, another boy had taught him magic words for hitting a bird with a stone: “Aim, aim, got my aim—if I miss you I’m not to blame.” He used it when he went to the country for the first time with a new slingshot, and the bird fell down dead.
Birds
“In our day it was camellias, not roses.” “That is true,” she said, “but the intention was different, and you know it.”
Flowers
