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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. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death.
“The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.”
In 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.
He liked to say that this love was the result of a clinical error.
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.
he had avoided reality in order not to cry.
More than twenty years had gone by since then, and Juvenal Urbino would very soon be as old as his father was that afternoon. He knew he was identical to him, and to that awareness had now been added the awful consciousness that he was also as mortal.
distorted by the prism of spiritual poverty.
The Widow Nazaret never missed her occasional appointments with Florentino Ariza, not even during her busiest times, and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love.
The truth is that she was a fearless apprentice but lacked all talent for guided fornication. She never understood the charm of serenity in bed, never had a moment of invention, and her orgasms were inopportune and epidermic: an uninspired lay.
“I adore you because you made me a whore.”
He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.
he convinced her that one comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays, and whoever does not use them for whatever reason, one’s own or someone else’s, willingly or unwillingly, loses them forever.
“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
What Uncle Leo XII never suspected was that 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.
The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.
She would open the door as her mother had raised her until she was seven years old: stark naked, with an organdy ribbon in her hair. She would not let him take another step until she had undressed him, because she thought it was bad luck to have a clothed man in the house.
She mounted him and took control of all of him for all of her, absorbed in herself, her eyes closed, gauging the situation in her absolute inner darkness, advancing here, retreating there, correcting her invisible route, trying another, more intense path, another means of proceeding without drowning in the slimy marsh that flowed from her womb, droning like a horsefly as she asked herself questions and answered in her native jargon;
until she succumbed without waiting for anybody, she fell alone into her abyss with a jubilant explosion of total victory that made the world tremble.
He would say: “You treat me as if I were just anybody.” She would roar with the laughter of a free female and say: “Not at all: as if you were nobody.”
She said: “I am happy to accept, but I warn you that I am crazy.”
“The world is divided into those who can shit and those who cannot.”
They groped like desperate virgins
She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: “You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”
love was everything they did naked. She said: “Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down.”
“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
or she had her period again, her period, always her period.
“There is no law, human or divine, that this man has not ignored.”
Tránsito Ariza used to say: “The only disease my son ever had was cholera.” She had confused cholera with love, of course, long before her memory failed.
It was not easy for her to establish real differences between children and adults, but in the last analysis she preferred children, because their judgment was more reliable.
He was a perfect husband: he never picked up anything from the floor, or turned out a light, or closed a door.
then the more she cried the more enraged she became, because she could never forgive her weakness in crying. He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run through by a spear,
And Josefa, the Widow Zúñiga, mad with love for him, who was ready to cut off his penis with gardening shears while he slept, so that he would belong to no one else even if he could not belong to her.
as naked as the day she was born, playing the most beautiful suites in all music on a cello whose voice became human between her golden thighs.
With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: 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.
Of all those on the list, she was the only one who earned a living with her body, but she did so at her pleasure and without a business manager.
Once he had told her something that she could not imagine: that amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches, in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to ask for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love.
“We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice,” he had once said to her. “But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”
“How strange women are,” he said.
“Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.”
Contrary to what the Captain and Zenaida supposed, they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.
For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.
