He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.

When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.

The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.

This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

There had never been a death so foretold.