“Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.”

“She wondered if she would have tumbled into love with him during the past week if her heart had been whole, if her soul had no been shattered long ago. She rather thought she might have. But a heart and soul could not be mended by the power of the will, she had discovered over seven years. And so she had accepted reality and moved on.”

“How old was More when Richard succeeded?He was five.When that dramatic council scene had taken place at the Tower, Thomas More had been five years old. He had been only eight when Richard died at Bosworth.Everything in that history had been hearsay.”

“At twelve o’clock, when Aureli-ano, José had bled to death and Carmelita Montiel found that the cards showing her future were blank, more than four hundred men had filed past the theater and discharged their revolvers into the abandoned body of Captain Aquiles Ricardo. A patrol had to use a wheelbarrow to carry the body, which was heavy with lead and fell apart like a water-soaked loaf of bread.”

“When it was over, she gathered him in her arms. And told him the terrible irony of her life.That she had wanted to be dead all those years while her brother had been alive. That had been her sin.And this was her penance.Wanting to live when everyone else seemed dead.”

“Well," Aureliano said. "Tell me what it is."Pilar Ternera bit her lips with a sad smile."That you would be good in a war," she said. "Where you put your eye, you put your bullet.”