the scent of bitter almonds

When I first read this book in high school, the following passage made an impression on me. I thought I had underlined it, but when I just now looked back in my copy, I couldn't locate it and sure enough I hadn't in fact underlined it and I was only able to locate where the passage is in my hard copy by doing a query on Google. So I'm glad I made a mental note of the passage, since it was a misapprehension that I've come back to periodically over the last eleven years.

He had also seen the only two pictures of his father. One had been taken in
Santa Fe, when he was very young, the same age as Florentino Ariza when he saw
the photograph for the first time, and in it he was wearing an overcoat that
made him look as if he were stuffed inside a bear, and he was leaning against a
pedestal that supported the decapitated gaiters of a statute. The little boy
beside him was Uncle Leo XII, wearing a ship captain's hat. In the other
photograph, his father was with a group of soldiers in God knows which of so
many wars, and he held the longest rifle, and his mustache had a gunpowder smell
that wafted out of the picture. He was a Liberal and a Mason, just like his
brothers, and yet he wanted his son to go to the seminary. Florentino Ariza did
not see the resemblance that people observed, but according to his Uncle Leo
XII, Pius V was also reprimanded for the lyricism of his documents. In any case,
he did not resemble him in the pictures, or in his memories of him, or in the
image transfigured by love that his mother painted, or in the one unpainted by
his Uncle Leo XII with his cruel wit. Nevertheless, Florentino Ariza discovered
the resemblance many years later, as he was combing his hair in front of the
mirror, and only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing old
because he begins to look like his father.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera 169-70.