Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
translated Edith Grossman (1988)

Fermina Daza was horrified when she heard the boat’s horn with her good ear, but by the second day of anisette she could hear better with both of them. She discovered that roses were more fragrant than before, that the birds sang at dawn much better than before, and that God had created a manatee and placed it on the bank at Tamalameque just so it could awaken her. The Captain heard it, had the boat change course, and at last they saw the enormous matron nursing the baby that she held in her arms. Neither Florentino nor Fermina was aware of how well they understood each other: she helped him to take his enemas, she got up before he did to brush the false teeth he kept in a glass while he slept, and she solved the problem of her misplaced spectacles, for she could use his for reading and mending. When she awoke one morning, she saw him sewing a button on his shirt in the darkness, and she hurried to do it for him before he could say the ritual phrase about needing two wives. On the other hand, the only thing she needed from him was that he cup a pain in her back.

Florentino Ariza, for his part, began to revive old memories with a violin borrowed from the orchestra, and in half a day he could play the waltz of “The Crowned Goddess” for her, and he played it for hours until they forced him to stop. One night, for the first time in her life, Fermina Daza suddenly awoke choking on tears of sorrow, not of rage, at the memory of the old couple in the boat beaten to death by the boatman. On the other hand, the incessant rain did not affect her, and she thought too late that perhaps Paris was not as gloomy as it had seemed, that Santa Fe did not have so many funerals passing along the streets. The dream of other voyages with Florentino Ariza appeared on the horizon: mad voyages, free of trunks, free of social commitments: voyages of love.

…Contrary to what the Captain and Zenaida supposed, they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous  calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and  the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

…The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

theoddmentemporium:

The London Necropolis Railway Line

The London Necropolis Railway Line was a railway line which functioned to transport cadavers and mourners from London to the newly opened Brookwood Cemetery 23 miles away in Surrey. The railway was opened in response to overflowing inner-city cemeteries. Throughout the early 19th century London had been subject to vast industrialisation leading to economic boom and, in turn, increased population with which the city could not cope. For example, the cholera epidemic of the late 1840s, which claimed the lives of 15,000 citizens, led to bodies piling up in the streets as cemeteries became saturated.

When it opening in November 1854, the Necropolis line was given its own platform at Waterloo Station (bodies would be kept in tunnels under the station as they awaited transportation) and a timetabled service saw coffins being transported by night, and mourners by day. The train made two stops; one at an Anglican cemetery and one at a Non-conformist cemetery. The carriages were also divided into classes so that posh dead people wouldn’t have to mingle with poor dead people. 

The service was never as popular as had been thought; in its heyday it transported a mere 2300 people a year, as opposed to the 50,000 envisioned for it. It did hang on for almost a century though, “Until the 1940s it remained a weird London institution, a ghoulish Victorian hangover that resisted time, social change and falling demand” [source]. Then, in 1941, bombing by Hitler’s Luftwaffe destroyed the Waterloo terminus and the LNR shipped its last cadaver.

[Sources:Dark Roasted Blend|Wikipedia|Image 2|Image 3]