Rereading 'Love In The Time Of Cholera' by Gabriel Gárcia Márquez and it is a joy to encounter his exquisite prose once again. Somehow I had forgotten about 'the odor of old age'. . .
[The suicide of his friend Jeremiah Saint-Amour inspires Dr. Urbino, now in his eighties, to meditate on his own death, especially the infirmities that accompany it. ]
"He was awakened by sadness. Not the sadness he had felt that
morning when he stood before the corpse of his friend, but the
invisible cloud that would saturate his soul after his siesta and which
he interpreted as divine notification that he was living his final
afternoons. Until the age of fifty he had not been conscious of the size
and weight and condition of his organs. Little by little, as he lay with
his eyes closed after his daily siesta, he had begun to feel them, one
by one, inside his body, feel the shape of his insomniac heart, his
mysterious liver, his hermetic pancreas, and he had slowly discovered
that even the oldest people were younger than he was and that he had
become the only survivor of his generation's legendary group portraits.
When he became aware of his first bouts of forgetfulness, he had
recourse to a tactic he had heard about from one of his teachers at the
Medical School: “The man who has no memory makes one out of
paper.” But this was a short-lived illusion, for he had reached the stage
where he would forget what the written reminders in his pockets
meant, search the entire house for the eyeglasses he was wearing,
turn the key again after locking the doors, and lose the sense of what
he was reading because he forgot the premise of the argument or the
relationships among the characters. But what disturbed him most was
his lack of confidence in his own power of reason: little by little, as in
an ineluctable shipwreck, he felt himself losing his good judgment.
With no scientific basis except his own experience, Dr. Juvenal Urbino
knew that most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but that
none was as specific as old age. ..."
