One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez

strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse.

His august head of a tormented emperor had acquired a strange air of grandeur.

When he asked for the most beautiful woman who had ever been seen on this earth, all the women brought him their daughters. He became lost in misty byways, in times reserved for oblivion, in labyrinths of disappointment. He crossed a yellow plain where the echo repeated one’s thoughts and where anxiety brought on premonitory mirages. After sterile weeks he came to an unknown city where all the bells were tolling a dirge. Although he had never seen them and no one had ever described them to him he immediately recognized the walls eaten away by bone salt, the broken-down wooden balconies gutted by fungus, and nailed to the outside door, almost erased by rain, the saddest cardboard sign in the world: Funeral Wreaths for Sale.

“Tell him,” the colonel said, smiling, “that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”

The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms.

Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.

one night she saw a row of luminous orange disks pass across the sky.

The indolence of the people was in contrast to the voracity of oblivion,

couple with unhinged bellies

impenitent and ill-fated times which were squandered on the useless effort of making them drift toward the desert of disenchantment and oblivion.

then they learned that dominant obsessions can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after other species of future animals would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man.

conscious that he was paying with his tardy sobs for a death that he had refused to weep for on time so as not to break the spell of love.

luminous orange disks that were crossing the sky

everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.