December is also month of...Books

This being the festive season, there are discounts on just about everything available out there, books included. Whenever I'm in Borders, my instinct is to buy a book that I like or, hopefully, will grow to like.

I am reading Love in the Time of Cholera now. Evocative and rich, it reminds me again how wonderful it is to read literary classics.

Fermina Daz was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo's horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighbourhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried her best to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more lumninous, more grief-striken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath:

"Only God knows how much I loved you."

It had not been easy for her to regain her self-control after she heard Digna Pardo's shriek in the patio and found the old man of her life dying in the mud. Her first reaction was one of hope, because his eyes were open and shining with a radiant light she had never seen before. 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 irresistable 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. Her grief exploded into a blind rage against the world, even against herself, and that is what filled her with the control and the courage to face her solitude alone... ...Before they closed the coffin Fermina Daz took off her wedding ring and put it on her dead husband's finger, and then she covered his hand with hers, as she always did when she caught him digressing in public.

"We will see each other very soon," she said to him.

The second paragraph from the book appeared some 4 pages after the first one. But there's a nice symmetry to what is being described and to the narrative. The first focused on the physical reaction of Fermina Daz who was rushing to her dying husband; the second described her feelings. Both complement to depict the sense of desvastation and depth of emotions running through her in that brief moment.

But more than anything else, their final words to each other - and their brevity - conveyed a sense of powerful love.