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invisible cloud that would saturate his soul after his siesta
School: “The man who has no memory makes one out of paper.”
“The man who has no memory makes one out of paper.”
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.
Marco Aurelio, a doctor like himself and like all the family’s firstborn sons in every generation, had done nothing worthy of note—he had not even produced a child.
group from the School of Fine Arts made a death mask that was to be used as the mold for a life-size bust, but the project was canceled because no one thought the faithful rendering of his final terror was decent.
a gigantic canvas in which Dr. Urbino was depicted on the ladder at the fatal moment when he stretched out his hand to capture the parrot.
bowler hat and black frock coat copied from a rotogravure made during the years of the cholera epidemic.
She began by convincing him not to deliver the lyrical sheaf of papers,
to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.
But when he was released he felt defrauded by the brevity of his captivity,
Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.
despite his many years of reading, he still could not judge what was good and what was not in all that he had read.
he himself had noted that his eyes seemed angry even when he was laughing at the gaming table.
distracted as he was by the flattering words of the in-laws who after so many years had put aside their tribal prejudices and welcomed him with open arms as one of their own.
complaisant
truth. “How noble this city must be,” he would say, “for we have spent four hundred years trying to finish it off and we still have not succeeded.”
“How noble this city must be,” he would say, “for we have spent four hundred years trying to finish it off and we still have not succeeded.”
That idea broke his heart, but he did nothing to suppress it; on the contrary, he took pleasure in his pain.
Little by little the fragrance of Fermina Daza became less frequent and less intense, and at last it remained only in white gardenias.
not reproaching him for any disloyalty other than his having died without her, which was mitigated by her conviction that he had never belonged to her as much as he did now that he was in the coffin nailed shut with a dozen three-inch nails and two meters under the ground.
That was her love nest, as she called it without irony, where she would receive only men she liked, when she liked, how she liked, and without charging one red cent, because in her opinion it was the men who were doing her the favor.
He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.
and at last, with no sorrow, they forgot each other.
Florentino Ariza did not feel either jealousy or rage—only great contempt for himself.
They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.
“You have to know languages when you go to sell something,” she said with mocking laughter. “But when you go to buy, everyone does what he must to understand you.”
ineluctable
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.
“When I Wake Up in Glory,” a beautiful and moving funeral song from Louisiana, and he was told to be quiet by the priest, who could not understand that Protestant intrusion in his church.
But he knew, more from hearsay than from personal experience, that such easy happiness could not last very long.
first there were no more than ten, some of them with their wives and children and edible dogs,
for there was no greater relief than weeping,
her melodious voice that she used only for saying intelligent and amusing things.
What d’you think she does over there, this beauty from our earth? Whenever she comes back from Paris, she’s ready to give birth.
fifteen-year-old goddaughter who had been raised as a family servant,
Fermina Daza was too proud to spy on her husband or to ask someone else to do it for her.
In this way she realized not only that her husband was in a state of mortal sin but that he had resolved to persist in it,
Then he reached the admirable decision not to go to Miss Lynch’s house at five o’clock in the afternoon. The vows of eternal love, the dream of a discreet house for her alone where he could visit her with no unexpected interruptions, their unhurried happiness for as long as they lived—everything he had promised in the blazing heat of love was canceled forever after.
his heart broken but his soul at peace.
“My God, this is longer than sorrow!”
but she did not respond either, not even with a shudder for courtesy’s sake.
Unfaithful but not disloyal.
that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.
“My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.”
She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate,
not thinking about the envy of the rich or the vengeance of the poor who were dying of hunger.
Without realizing it, he was beginning to defer his problems in the hope that death would resolve them.
“Each time I pass that bank,” he said, “I pray to God that the gringo will board my ship so that I can leave him behind all over again.”
They both made the same gesture of surprise that they both knew was feigned,
