Excerpt from Love in the Time of Cholera

The father was unable to witness his own glory in person. When he discovered that the same incurable disease he had seen and pitied in others had appeared in himself, he did not even make a futile attempt to struggle; he isolated himself so as not to infect others. He locked himself in a storeroom at the Mercy Hospital, deaf to colleagues' knocking and to his family's pleading, and untroubled by the terrified cries of cholera patients on the crowded corridor floor who were dying and struggling; he wrote a letter full of passionate love to his wife and children. In the letter he revealed an intense love and attachment to life and the gratitude that sprang from it. It was a twenty-page farewell. The stationery was crumpled and wrinkled, and his increasingly deteriorating handwriting showed his condition worsening. You didn't need to know the writer to see that the signature had been written with his last breath. According to his wishes, his gray-white body was buried in a common grave in the public cemetery, not shown to anyone who loved him.

Memory always erases the bad and exaggerates the good, and it is precisely because of this mystery that we are able to bear the burdens of the past.

The city's lights had disappeared on the horizon. From the pitch-black lookout, the smooth and silent river and the reeds on both banks under a full moon had become a plain glowing with phosphorescence. Occasionally one could see huts, with blazing bonfires beside them to indicate that they were selling firewood for the steamboats' boilers.

Florentino Ariza cautiously steered the conversation toward a less sensitive subject, but his politeness was so obvious that she knew she had been seen through, which only increased her anger.

He wanted to retort as swiftly as an arrow by instinct, but the weight of his years overcame him: he had never felt so exhausted in such a brief conversation; he felt a dull ache in his heart, and with each beat there was a metallic echo in his arteries. He felt old, forlorn, useless, and had an urgent, almost overwhelming urge to cry, so that he could say nothing more.

"What a ridiculous way to die!" she said. "There is nothing funny about death," he said, and added sadly, "especially at our age."

He trembled because he was surrounded by a sense of dread: with an almost incredible clarity he realized that if he died, the death knell would be rung for him just the same.

Her husband loved her above all, more than anyone in the world, but even that was only for himself: it was his sacred duty.

She saw Florentino Ariza talking with the captain. He seemed like a different man, not because she now looked at him differently but because he actually looked different. He was not wearing the funeral-like clothes he'd worn all his life; instead he had comfortable white leather shoes, linen trousers, a short-sleeved linen shirt with an open collar, and his breast pocket was embroidered with his monogram. He wore a white Scottish cap on his head, and on the spectacles he always wore there was an attachable dark lens. Clearly these items were being worn for the first time, bought specifically for this trip. Except for an already-too-worn brown leather belt — which Fermina Daza spotted at once as if she had discovered a fly in the soup — everything was new. Seeing how plainly he had made an effort for her, a flush of hot color rose to her cheeks. She felt flustered when she greeted him. Seeing her like that, he became flustered too. As they realized that their behavior resembled that of lovers, they became more and more at a loss, and when they became aware of their embarrassment it sent them into an even greater panic, so much so that Captain Samaritan also noticed and felt a sympathetic shiver.