"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."
Reading the words in the 348-pages book that flow so evocatively that it often seemed what was being described was a natural depiction of reality and not imagined by words, one sometimes feels as if one's breathing were suspended. It's as if reading without stopping is compelled by the sheer lyrical magic of the prose. Here's more, and if you like it, go grab a copy and read it.
At his back, a woman's voice seemed to read his thoughts:
"My God, this is longer than sorrow!"
That was all she said, inhibited perhaps by the resonance of her voice in the darkness, for the custom of embellishing silent films with piano accompaniment had not yet been established here, and in the darkened enclosure all that one could hear was the projector murmuring like rain. Florentino Ariza did not think of God except in the most extreme circumstances, but now he thanked Him with all his heart. For even twenty fathoms underground he would instantly have recognized the husky voice he had carried in his soul ever since the afternon when he heard her say in a swirl of yellow leaves in a solitary park: "Now go, and don't come back until i tell you to." He knew that she was sitting in the seat behind his, next to her inevitable husband, and he could detect her warm, even breathing, and he inhaled with love the air purified by the health of her breath. Instead of imagining her under attack by the devouring worms of death, as he had in his despondency of recent months, he recalled her at a radiant and joyful age, her belly rounded under the Minervan historical disasters that were crowding the screen, he did not need to turn around to see her in his imagination. He delighted in the scent of almonds that came wafting back to him from his innermost being, and he longed to know how she thought women in films should fall in love so that their loves would cause less pain than they did in life. Just before the film ended, he realized in a flash of exultation that he had never so close, so long, to the one he loved so much.
They called each other Tu again, again they exchanged commentaries on their lives as they had done once before in their letters, and again Florentino Ariza tried to move too quickly: he wrote her name with the point of a pin on the petals of a camellia and sent it to her in a letter. Two days later it was returned with no message. Fermina Daza could not help it: all that seemed like children's games to her, most of all when Florentino Ariza insisted on evoking the afternoons of melancholy verses in the Park of the Evangels, the letters hidden along her route to school, the embroidery lessons under the almond trees. With sorrowing heart she reprimmanded him in what appeared to be a casual question in the midst of other trivial remarks: "Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?" Later she reproached him for his fruitless insistence on not permitting himself to grow old in a natural way. This was, according to her, the reason for his haste and constant blundering as he evoked the past. She could not understand how a man capable of the thoughts that had given her the strength to endure her widowhood could become entangled in so childish a manner when he attempted to apply them to his own life. Their roles were reversed. Now it was she who tried to give him new courage to face the future, with a phrase that he, in his reckless haste, could not decipher: Let time pass and we will see what it brings. For he was never as good a student as she was. His forced immobility, the growing ludicity of his conviction that time was fleeting, his mad desire to see her, everything proved to him that his fear of falling had been more accurate and more tragic than he had foreseen. For the first time, he began to think in a reasoned way about the reality of death.
- Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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