Her children are grown. "For twenty-seven of her forty-six years she had been in a well-matched marriage with a man she loved and who loved her and whom she married before finishing her arts-and-letters degree, still a virgin and without any previous relationships."
So begins the mystery of Ana Magdalena's carnal pursuits.
A few years earlier, Ana Magdalena had buried her mother on an island that had been her lifelong home. Every August, on the anniversary of her mother's death, she travels to the island to place a bouquet of gladioli on her grave. She's fallen into a routine, hiring the same taxi to the same hotel, visiting the cemetery in the afternoon, relaxing back at the hotel in the evening, returning home on the morning ferry.
She knows when she steps off the ferry that this time will be different. Boarding the ferry the next morning, she's not sure why she did it. She doesn't even know his name and she's torn between rage and insult that he left a twenty-dollar bill on the bedside table before quietly slipping away at dawn.
Back home, Ana Magdalena revels in the memories of the love life she's had with her husband. Passionate sex, frequent and urgent enough to risk getting caught coupling in inappropriate places. He's still a good lover.
She doesn't feel she's lacking sexual satisfaction from her husband and doesn't really care that he's had a few other lovers over the years. But when August comes around again, she is determined to find another lover. Each year is different, a different man, a different experience.
All of them involve unsettling passion, ". . . they threw themselves into the inconceivable pleasure of brute force subjugated by tenderness."
Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) should be happy, as I am, that his family unearthed and published what is a final brushstroke on the broad canvas of his career.
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