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for the barely healed wounds could begin to bleed again as if they had been inflicted only yesterday.
“It is a pity to still find a suicide that is not for love.”
Little by little he idealized her, endowing her with improbable virtues and imaginary sentiments, and after two weeks he thought of nothing else but her.
All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.
“Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can,” she said to him, “because these things don’t last your whole life.”
reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line.
To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter.
but she erased him from her life with a wave of her hand.
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.
Little by little he grew accustomed to the sultry heat of October, to the excessive odors, to the hasty judgments of his friends, to the We’ll see tomorrow, Doctor, don’t worry, and at last he gave in to the spell of habit. It did not take him long to invent an easy justification for his surrender. This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.
He tried to impose the latest ideas at Misericordia Hospital, but this was not as easy as it had seemed in his youthful enthusiasm, for the antiquated house of health was stubborn in its attachment to atavistic superstitions, such as standing beds in pots of water to prevent disease from climbing up the legs, or requiring evening wear and chamois gloves in the operating room because it was taken for granted that elegance was an essential condition for asepsis.
Hildebranda had a universal conception of love, and she believed that whatever happened to one love affected all other loves throughout the world.
for at the height of pleasure he had experienced a revelation that he could not believe, that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion.
Woh mujhe yaad to aata hai magar, kaam Kai baad!
the duplicity of the nuns had provoked in her a certain resistance to rituals, but her faith was intact, and she had learned to maintain it in silence.
human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
his nephew’s courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.
But he knew, more from hearsay than from personal experience, that such easy happiness could not last very long.
“The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not.”
He had participated several times since the inaugural competition, and he had never received even honorable mention. But that did not matter to him, for he did compete not out of ambition for the prize but because the contest held an additional attraction for him: in the first session Fermina Daza had opened the sealed envelopes and announced the names of the winners, and then it was established that she would continue to do so in the years that followed.
“It is as if he were not a person but only a shadow.”
She suspected too late that behind his professional authority and worldly charm, the man she had married was a hopeless weakling: a poor devil made bold by the social weight of his family names.
It was against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions.
Until then he had behaved as if time would not pass for him but only for others.
Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in his house, not for the exquisite frame but because of the place inside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved reflection.
“The only frustration I carry away from this life is that of singing at so many funerals except my own.”
