Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.
Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.
No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.
Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.
I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they’re dead, because that’s where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.
Morality, too, is a question of time.
It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.
She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had.
The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.
Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love.
I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.
The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.
Fatality makes us invisible.
The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.
He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.
It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.
The fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied.
She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.
Shame has poor memory.