- It was a long night, perhaps the longest in my life. I spent it sitting next to Rosa's tomb, speaking with her, accompanying her on the first part of her journey to the Hereafter, which is when it's the hardest to detach yourself from earth and you need the love of those who have remained behind, so you can leave with at least the consolation of having planted something in someone else's heart. I remembered her perfect face and cursed my luck. I blamed Rosa for the years I had spent dreaming of her deep within the mine. I didn't tell her that I hadn't seen any other women all that time except for a handful of shriveled old prostitutes, who serviced the whole camp with more good will than ability. But I did tell her that I lived among rough, lawless men that I had eaten chick-peas and drunk green water far from civilization, thinking of her night and day and bearing her image in my soul like a banner that gave me the strength to keep hacking at the mountain even if the lode was lost, even if I was sick to stomach the whole year round,even if I was frozen to the bone at night and dazed by the sun during the day, all with the single goal of marrying her, but she goes and dies on me, betraying me before I can fulfill my dreams, leaving me with the incurable despair. I told her she had mocked me, that we had never been completely alone together, that I had only been able to kiss her once. I had had to weave my love out of memories and cravings that were impossible to satisfy, out of letters that took forever to arrive and arrived faded, and were incapable of reflecting the intensity of my feelings or the pain of her absence, because I have no gift for letter writing and much less for writing about my own emotions. I told her that those years in the mine were an irremediable loss, and that if I had known she wasn't long for this world I would have stolen the money that I needed to marry her and built her a palace studded with treasures from the ocean floor -- with pearls and coral and walls of nacre. I would have kidnapped her and locked her up, and only I would have had the key. I would have loved her without interruption almost till infinity, for I was convinced that if she had been with me she would never have drunk the poison that was meant for her father and she would have lived a thousand years. I told her of the caresses I'd saved for her, the presents with which I'd planned to surprise her, the ways I would have loved her and made her happy. In short, I told her all the crazy things I never would have said if she could hear me and that I've never told a woman since. That night I thought I had lost my ability to fall in love forever, that I would never laugh again or pursue an illusion. But never is a long time. I've learned that much in my long life.
- Clara let him scream his head off and bang on the furniture until he was exhausted. Then, inattentive as ever, she asked him if he knew how to wiggle his ears.
- Blanca preferred those furtive hotel rendezvous with her lover to the routine of everyday life, the weariness of marriage and the shared poverty at the end of every month, the bad taste in the mouth on waking up, the tedium of Sundays, and the complaints of old age. She was an incurable romantic. Every once in a while she was tempted to take her clown's suitcase and whatever was left of the jewels from the sock and go off with her daughter to live with him, but she always lost her nerve. Perhaps she feared the grandiose love that had stood so many tests would not be able to withstand the most dreadful test of all: living together.
- Thus Blanca's youth went by and she entered middle age, resigned to the fact that her only moments of pleasure would come when she dressed up in her best clothes, her perfume, and her whorish underwear, which captivated Pedro Tercero and which she hid, red with shame, in the bottom of her wardrobe, imagining the explanations she would have to give if anyone discovered them.
- it was still raining outside, and the routine of the city continued undisturbed. No one seemed to care about another student strike, and people walked past the tanks without stopping to read the placards hanging from the university façade. The neighbors quickly became accustomed to the presence of armed police, and when the rain stopped children ran out ot play with a ball under the streetlights in the empty parking lots that separated the building from the police detachments.
- He was the ideologue who made his students burn with the flame that in most of them extinguished itself as soon as they graduated and joined the world they had once hoped to change.
- To avoid arguing with his father, he acquired a habit of silence and soon discovered it was far more comfortable. The only time he abandoned his Trappist laconism was when Alba went to visit him in his tunnel of books. His niece always arrived in her nightgown, her hair wet from the shower, and sat at the foot of his be to tell him happy stories, because, as she put it, he was a magnet for other people's problems and irreversible disasters, and someone had to keep him posted about spring and love.
- At that moment, the President was speaking on the phone with the head of the uprising, who was offering him a military plane to leave the country with his family. But he was not the kind of man to become an exile in some distant place where we would spend the rest of his life vegetating with other disposed leaders who had left their countries on a moment's notice.
aug 31 2009 ∞
aug 31 2009 +