After Gabriel García Márquez died, I picked up my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera – or rather your copy, since your name is still written on the first page. For years, the book’s been a permanent fixture on my shelf; until yesterday, I forgot how it ever appeared.

You may not remember, but you gave me the book for my birthday, a day I hated and which I still hate, even though I have, in my old age, resigned myself to the fact that birthdays are like funerals – events which the guests require but which the person of honour would be just as happy to avoid. I never liked to talk about my birthday but somehow you got it out of me, which was a talent you had. I don’t know what you’re doing now, but if it turns out you extract state secrets from spies and assassins, I won’t be surprised. When we knew each other, your skills were beyond reproach.

“It’s August 1^rst,” I confessed. “Now you have to swear you won’t ever throw a surprise party.”

Since an early age, I have lived in mortal terror of surprise parties. I don’t know what the clinical term for this is – maybe admiriatophobia, since admiriato is the Latin word for surprise –  but the thought of them gives me the usual assortment of palpitations and murderous thoughts. This fear is why my birthday is a closely guarded secret. I succumb to an illogical syllogism: since some surprise parties celebrate birthdays, all birthdays will lead to surprise parties. Irrational, I know, but you can’t reason with fear. My wife blames my parents, who must have made some irrevocable mistake when I was a boy, resulting in my conviction that surprise parties are the invention of a malicious mind.

I didn’t believe you had a malicious mind – just a mischievous one. Knowing I didn’t want to reveal my birthday, you badgered me until I did. So why shouldn’t I fear you would throw me a party I didn’t want?

“I’m serious,” I said. “If you throw me a surprise party, I’ll probably leave town. No, not just the town. The country.”

You rolled your eyes. I became paranoid. The fact that I didn’t run away from you probably says all that I need to about how I felt in those days. I was already hooked, even though it was less than a week after that night we got drunk and decided to rent Cinema Paradiso. Remember that? Remember video stores and renting movies at 2 AM? Only Movieland didn’t have Cinema Paradiso so we got Central Station instead. Usually I wouldn’t agree to watch a foreign film but it was either that or go home alone. And I wasn’t going home alone.  

You had two couches and I chose one at random, thinking that if you sat next to me, it was a sign. You sat next to me. We fell asleep. We were badly intertwined and when I muttered I had a kink in my back, you shifted your position. That’s when you had me. A person’s character can be judged by the amount of selflessness they demonstrate when they’re half-awake.

I had to open the restaurant that day and while I’m pretty adept at working without sleep, that whole day I was a corpse. I kept dropping things and at one point, while making pico de gallo, I nearly sliced off my thumb. Then, around three o’clock, you appeared and handed me a skinny café mocha. It was an elixir, restoring me as all magic potions should.

“Call me later if you’re bored,” I said.

Was there ever a more naked request? The desperation in “call me”, the vague earnestness in “later”, the modicum of self-depreciation in “if you’re bored”? You replied with a non-committal grunt and on my way home I began to wish I had kept my voice to myself. I wanted to call you; I also wanted to never see you again. I’m always worried I’m going to lose a girl because I’ve either called too much or I haven’t called at all.

When I got home, I took a nap. Sleep deprivation impairs judgement. But when I woke, I still felt lousy. It wasn’t my judgement that was impaired. It was me.

I stared at the phone. Then the phone rang. “I’m bored,” you said.

My favourite story about Gabriel García Márquez is one told in Gerald Martin’s expansive biography. García Márquez was very poor and when it came time to send the manuscript for One Hundred Years of Solitude, he found he couldn’t afford to send the entire thing. With the manuscript on the postal meter, the future Nobel-prize laureate began to remove pages until the book was light enough that he could afford the rate. It was practical in more ways than one. It was the 1960s and I’m pretty sure García Márquez had sent his only copy; by dividing the parcel in two, he limited the amount of work he’d have to do if one of the packages ever got lost.

I read this story years after you had slipped into the ether. I did not think of you as I was reading the book. By then, I had come to believe the lie that I had come to Gabriel García Márquez entirely on my own, a myth I adopted soon after you and I broke up outside that Montreal pub. Your rejection was as abrupt and merciless as the one Fermina gives Florentino in Love in the Time of Cholera. After months of love letters, she meets him in the market and suddenly has a change of heart. This happens on Page 102; they still have two hundred pages to go. We weren’t so lucky. Standing outside that pub, we had reached the last sentence in the final paragraph of the ultimate page.

“I need to be alone on the couch for a while,” you said and I ran from you in a rage.

Fermina and Florentino fall in love through letters and are chaste until Page 340. I don’t think I ever received a letter from you, unless you count that note you left in my mailbox. And we were anything but chaste. You chewed gum all the time and used to take it out when we kissed. You would stick it under the tables in my apartment and forget about it, leaving me with an unenviable dilemma. The gum was like Fermina’s braid of hair, which Florentino keeps in a glass display cage until she breaks his heart. I didn’t want to throw it away, even though it became vile and hard, as solid as a tumour and just as hateful to explain. Eventually I caved, but each time I scraped the gum away, I felt I was committing a mortal sin. The gum, if I remember correctly, was because you were ashamed of your breath, which bore the scent of a thousand cigarettes. Didn’t you tell me you began smoking after an earthquake rattled you when you were young? The tremors had been nothing but a minor seismic fit yet it tore at whatever idea of security you once possessed. You lost all faith in the safety of your house, the fortitude of your parents, the strength of the police, the power of the Prime Minister and the compassion of God; you began to smoke to calm your nerves after the realization, at the tender age of nine and a half, that in this universe each of us are completely alone.

Whenever I closed the restaurant, you would wait for me at that Irish pub across the street, where that bartender with the crippled hand would pour us drinks until last call. By the time we reached your apartment, it was almost sunrise. In the great battle between lust and exhaustion, lust always lost. Our lovemaking was sloppy and without grace. We would wake in the morning, or rather the early afternoon, steeped in some wretched hangover, our breath foul, our bodies rank. You would take me for breakfast at the casse-croute near your house and I had just enough time to shower before going back to work. I lived like this for weeks.

I had one dream – to be a great novelist – while your own dreams were scrawled on an expansive list you kept in your purse. Items I remember, in no particular order: find buried treasure, meet a Queen, see Alaska from a kayak, memorize Alice in Wonderland, beat your mother at cribbage, have five children, own a dog, ban margarine, learn salsa, travel to Chile, travel to Thailand, travel through time. Did you ever accomplish these things? You certainly hadn’t while we were together, but I liked that there was a list and you carried it with you and added to it with that grey pen with the blueberry ink.

By the night before my birthday, I felt as if we had been in love for years and I was ashamed at getting old and worn down, even though less than fifty-three days had passed since we had watched Central Station. You called and told me to meet you at that Irish pub and I became filled with terror: here, at last, was the surprise party I had feared for so long. I almost didn’t go to meet you and I walked to the bar like a prisoner shuffling toward the gallows.

 I found you alone, drinking a vodka-cranberry soda and breezing your way through the crossword in the Gazette (in pen, you confidant wonder! Please tell me that this has never changed! Pencils are practical but permanent ink is for the bold.) We ordered food and it wasn’t until dessert that you swore in displeasure when you saw your watch had stopped. Fearing a panic attack, I escaped to the rest room and spent several moments breathing deep and calming the blood.

On my way back, I decided to fortify myself and ordered two shots at the bar. The bartender with the crippled hand gave me four instead. He didn’t charge me for the mistake. “A gift,” he shrugged. He couldn’t possibly have known it was my birthday but my hands shook as I carried the shots back to the bar.

“We can’t finish all of these,” you said. “Give some to our neighbours.”

I went to the two girls who were sitting nearby. “A gift,” I said.

“It’s your birthday,” said a girl with flaming red hair. “We’re supposed to be giving the gifts to you.”

She gave me a chocolate bar from her purse. That’s when I realized that while I had been at the bar, you had not only asked those two girls for the time, but had told them why you needed it. My future was coming; they knew what it was. We drank our shots and then these girls slipped out while I sank into my seat. Having reset your watch, you now kept glancing at your wrist. I became hard with fear, waiting for the thunderclap that would herald the party which was about to come raining down.

Then it was midnight.

“I have something for you,” you said and that was when you gave me Love in the Time of Cholera. “The last page is my favourite. I went to every store in the city but it was out of stock. So I’m giving you my copy. My name’s in it. You can scratch it out.”

I took the book. I began to breathe normally. There was no party. You had suppressed your mischievous spirit and in doing so, committed a great and wondrous act of love.

The next day, I sat down to read Love in the Time of Cholera, only to stop when I was struck with the absurd terror that if I ever finished the book, it would suddenly disappear. Of course, this is precisely what happens to Aureliano Babilonia in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which at the time I still hadn’t read. Aureliano Babilonia learns that the city will be wiped out the moment he finishes reading the parchments in his hand because every last word is unrepeatable.

It was the fear of something similar happening that kept me from actually reading Love in the Time of Cholera until after you and I were through. Only then could I read without concern; there was nothing left to lose.

After you left, I developed apnea; for months, no matter what position I slept in, I snored with such conviction that my cat ran from me in fear. After almost a year of this, I went to a sleeping clinic. By chance it was the first of August and, upon meeting me, the doctor wished me a happy birthday. I assumed she had read the date on my forms – but she hadn’t even glanced at my file.

 “I’m afraid I don’t have another chocolate bar,” she grinned.

She forgave me for not remembering her; once upon a time, she had had flaming red hair. In the year since, she had gone back to her usual shade.

We’re married now and for years I’ve pushed away all the events that conspired to ensure we could meet. I started wearing a special mask at night and I think that was when I started to forget you; all I needed, it turns out, was a good night’s sleep. We left Montreal and I stopped thinking of you until I read about the death of García Márquez. I’m sorry for this. I was young and ridiculous; burying you seems a shabby thing to do.

Shortly after I clipped that obituary, the fire alarm went off in my building. My wife was out of town and in my frenzy to escape I only rescued three things: my wedding ring, our diabetic dog, and the one book I own which has your name written in blueberry ink. As I stood outside in my pyjamas and the fire engines roared to the rescue (someone had been smoking in bed) I began to remember all the things I’ve just written down and one more thing I haven’t: it was over a year after you left, while riding the bus through the city which had once been ours, that I finally opened Love in the Time of Cholera. I had just started dating my sleep doctor and I read the last page first because I wasn’t in the mood for another tragedy. It was only then that I went back to the start, comforted in the knowledge that a story can end well even if it begins with death and the smell of burnt almonds which, as Gabriel Garçia Márquez taught us, is the eternal smell of unrequited love.   

– Joel Fishbane