One Hundred Years of Solitude

Watching the glow of the fire
as it gilded the persistent
woman who neither then nor
in any instant of her life
seemed to exist completely,
he suddenly remembered that
on one October eleventh in
the middle of the war he had
awakened with the brutal
certainty that the woman with
whom he had slept was dead.
She really was and he could
not forget the date because
she had asked him an hour