“Do you think she’ll agree?”

“Ah, my sad scholar, it’s all right for you to be old but not an asshole,” Rosa Cabarcas, weak with laughter. “That poor creature’s head over heels in love with you.”

I went out to the street, radiant, and for the first time I could not recognize myself on the remote horizon of my first century. My house, silent and in order at six-fifteen, began to enjoy the colors of a joyous dawn. Damiana was singing at the top of her voice in the kitchen, and the resuscitated cat twined his tail around my ankles and continued walking with me to my writing table. I was arranging my languishing papers, the inkwell, the goose quill, when the sun broke through the almond trees in the park and the river mail packet, a week late because of the drought, bellowed as it entered the canal in the port. 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.

May 2004

Gabriel Garcia Marquez