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Neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer.
But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
He did not have to keep a running tally, drawing a line for each day on the walls of a cell, because not a day had passed that something did not happen to remind him of 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.
Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.
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 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.
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. They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.
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.
He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.
hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.
“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
She dared to tell herself that perhaps she would have been happier with him, alone with him in that house she had restored for him with as much love as he had felt when he restored his house for her, and that simple hypothesis dismayed her because it permitted her to realize the extreme of unhappiness she had reached.
She had barely turned the corner into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusionment of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young,
Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
It was during the first glimmering of old age, when she began to feel that something irreparable had occurred in her life whenever she heard thunder before the rain.
But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.
She was left dangling, barely at the entrance of her tunnel of solitude, while he was already buttoning up again, as exhausted as if he had made absolute love on the dividing line between life and death, when in reality he had accomplished no more than the physical act that is only a part of the feat of love.
Florentino Ariza had seen himself reflected so often in that mirror that he was never as afraid of death as he was of reaching that humiliating age when he would have to be led on a woman’s arm.
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.
For that was what he needed: to let his soul escape through his mouth.
ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.
“It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.”
“I’ve remained a virgin for you.” She would not have believed it in any event, even if it had been true, because his love letters were composed of similar phrases whose meaning mattered less than their brilliance.
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.
