marquez_testing.txt

IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him 
of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as 
he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent 
call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years 
before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war 
veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent 
in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic 
fumes of gold cyanide. 

He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where 
he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the developing tray 
he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the 
cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and 
next to him were the crutches. At one window the splendor of dawn 
was just beginning to illuminate the stifling, crowded room that served 
as both bedroom and laboratory, but there was enough light for him to 
recognize at once the authority of death. The other windows, as well as 
every other chink in the room, were muffled with rags or sealed with 
black cardboard, which increased the oppressive heaviness. A counter 
was crammed with jars and bottles without labels and two crumbling 
pewter trays under an ordinary light bulb covered with red paper. The 
third tray, the one for the fixative solution, was next to the body. 
There were old magazines and newspapers everywhere, piles of 
negatives on glass plates, broken furniture, but everything was kept 
free of dust by a diligent hand. Although the air coming through the 
window had purified the atmosphere, there still remained for the one 
who could identify it the dying embers of hapless love in the bitter 
almonds. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had often thought, with no premonitory 
intention, that this would not be a propitious place for dying in a state 
of grace. But in time he came to suppose that perhaps its disorder 
obeyed an obscure determination of Divine Providence. 
A police inspector had come forward with a very young medical 
student who was completing his forensic training at the municipal 
dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room and covered 
the body while waiting for Dr. Urbino to arrive. They greeted him with 
a solemnity that on this occasion had more of condolence than 
veneration, for no one was unaware of the degree of his friendship 
with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour.