Love in the Time of Cholera

Előszó

It was inevitable: die scent of bittér almonds always reminded hím of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a ease that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de SaintAmour, disabled war veterán, photographer of children, and his most sympathetíc opponent in ehess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide. He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and next to him were the crutches. At one window the splendor of dawn was just beginning to illuminate the stiíling, crowded room that served as both bedroom and laboratory, but there was enough light for him to recognize at once the authority of death. The other windows, as well as every other chink in the room, were muffled with rags or sealed with black cardboard, which increased the oppressive heaviness. A counter was crammed with jars and bottles without labels and two crumbhng pewter trays under an ordinary light bulb covered with red paper. The third tray, the one for the íixative solution, was next to the body. There were old magazines and newspapers everywhere, piles of negatives on glass plates, broken furniture, but every- Vissza