When Dr. Juvenal Urbino died, aged eighty-one-and-a-half, his widow, the once breath-taking Fermina Daza, instinctively recoiled from the one hand extended to steady and comfort her. A hand which for her long life had always been within reach but which, in her haughtiness and guilt, she would not acknowledge: the hand of Florentino Ariza. Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells a haunting love story.