Był jeszcze zbyt młody, aby wiedzieć, że pamięć serca unicestwia złe wspomnienia, wyolbrzymiając dobre, i że dzięki temu mechanizmowi udaje nam się znosić ciężar przeszłości.

Mamy już niepodległość, panie generale, więc teraz proszę nam powiedzieć, co z nią zrobimy.

She would say: "Someone
should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but
that you still cannot throw out." That was true: she was dismayed by
the voracity with which objects kept invading living spaces, displacing
the humans, forcing them back into the corners, until Fermina Daza
pushed the objects out of sight. For she was not as ordered as people
thought, but she did have her own desperate method for appearing to
be so: she hid the disorder. The day that Juvenal Urbino died, they had



to empty out half of his study and pile the things in the bedrooms so
there would be space to lay out the body.

Death's passage through the house brought the solution. Once she had
burned her husband's clothes, Fermina Daza realized that her hand had
not trembled, and on the same impulse she continued to light the fire
at regular intervals, throwing everything on it, old and new, not
thinking about the envy of the rich or the vengeance of the poor who
were dying of hunger. Finally, she had the mango tree cut back at the
roots until there was nothing left of that misfortune, and she gave the
live parrot to the new Museum of the City. Only then did she draw a
free breath in the kind of house she had always dreamed of: large,
easy, and all hers.

Los seres humanos no nacen para siempre el día en que sus madres los alumbran, sino que la vida los obliga a parirse a sí mismos una y otra vez.

In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kidding on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.