as they passed by the marshes, Dr. Urbino recognized their oppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases, which on so many insomniac dawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jasmine from the patio, and which he felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life.

by the time they found the house, gangs of ragged children were chasing the carriage and ridiculing the theatrical finery of the coachman, who had to drive them away with his whip. Dr. Urbino, prepared for a confidential visit, realized too late that there was no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.

Dr. Urbino, who thought he had heard everything, had never heard anything like that, and said with such simplicity.

she would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory, she would not bury herself alive inside these four walls to sew her shroud, as native widows were expected to do.

she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past.

he was still too young tto know that the 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

he toasted the memory of his father with champagne. he said: "he was a good man." he later would reproach himself for his lack of maturity: he had avoided reality in order not to cry...

Dr. Juvenla Urbino and his family had conceived of death as a misfortune that befell others, other people's fathers and motherrs, other people's brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs. they were ppeople whose lives werre slow, who did not see themselves as growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.

then his journey seemed yet another proof of his mother's wisdom, and he felt that he had the fortitude to endure forgetting.

...then he wiped him from his memory, because among other things, his profession had accustomed him to the ethical management of forgetfulness.

but he could not rerspond as he would have liked, because then his heart played one of those whorish tricks that only hearts can play: it revealed to him that he and this man, whom he had always considered his personal enemy, were victims of the same fate and shared the hazards of a common passion; they were two animals yoked together.