Excerpts From Gabriel García Márquez’s Love In the Time of Covfefe

“IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of covfefe always reminded him of the fate of dying love.”

“Kellyanne would defend herself, saying that alternative facts, no matter what else they may be, were from a natural talent she could not deny. She would say: ‘You are either born knowing how to tell alternative facts, or you never know how to tell alternative facts.’”

“To George she seemed so gorgeous, so elegantly aloof, so different from honest people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the brightness of her ridiculous red hat, why no one else’s heart was crazy with the whimsical Paddington Bear dress she wore, why everyone did not go mad over her comically-arched eyebrows, her willingness to say anything, the snark in her tweets.”

“Tell the Commander of Cheese, yes. Even if you know it may kill your marriage, even if you are sorry later and your husband ends up hating you, because you are the Trump Whisperer, and you will make less money than if you say no.”

“But when a woman decides to work for a president, there is no wall she will not promote, no massacre she will not invent, no moral consideration she will not ignore even at the possible cost of her marriage: there is no stone cold loser worth worrying about.”

“With her George learned again what he had already known many times without realizing it: that one can love someone and disrespect them at the same time, feel overwhelming disgust and irritation, and not support them. Alone in the bathroom tweeting, he thought to himself in a flash of anger: ‘Kellyanne tells more lies than the White House.’”

“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s president just because they are one’s president but because of the benefits secretly gained while lying for them and promoting their daughter’s clothing line.”

“She arrived at the White House in the middle of the panic, clicked down two or three hallways like a scent-trained dog, and found Pence asleep in an armoire he often sat in during interviews. When an astonished George asked her how she had found him, she replied: ‘By the smell of caca.’"

“It was as if they had jumped over the arduous grind of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of a terrible marriage. They were together on Fox News and MSNBC like an old married couple with different political views, beyond the pitfalls of the presidency, beyond the brutal mockery of fake news and the embarrassing gaffes: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that their marriage had always been meh, but it was more of a joke the closer it came to Trump.”

“Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes if one of you didn’t work for a president the other considered a threat to the nation.”

“But in their solitary moments they began to understand that they were in charge of their fate, after having embarrassed their family and fighting publicly in exchange for attention that was no more than five minutes of fame destined to change the minds of no one. They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved and hated to distraction, who perhaps would destroy them but whom they had to continue fighting over during his term as if he were a child, suckling their disagreement from them, soiling his diapers with dishonesty, distracting them with tantrums to entice the press at their marriage’s expense. But nevertheless, when they read his tweets, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he actually would.”

“The problem in public life was learning to overcome terror. The problem in their marriage was learning to overcome public life.”

“He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tweets of betrayal and his anger at watching her lie on television, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more accusing, more confused, more angry than she had ever seen them in decades of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “The man you work for is a narcissistic buffoon.”

“Do you mean what you say?” George asked.

“From the moment I was born,” said Kellyanne, “I have never said anything I did not mean unless I meant it in a different way.”

George looked at Kellyanne, his alternative-fact creator, his rabid spouse, and he was overwhelmed by the knowledge that it was her lies, more than her truth, that knew no limits.

“And how long do you think we can keep up this damn thing going?” he asked.

Kellyanne had kept her answer ready for over 750 days, and over 18,000 hours, and over 1,080,000 minutes.

“At least until the end of his term,” she said.