Love In The Time Of Cholera

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

Awards: LA Times Winner 1988, Nobel Prize Winner 1998

Nominations: NY Times Finalist 1988, Oprah Book Club 2007

 

Date Read: March 16, 2022

 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a master. His writing is so seductive, sensual and beguiling. I want more, more, more. Every time. Always. His Nobel Prize is well-deserved.

 

Love In The Time Of Cholera is about longing. It is about love that doesn’t waver and that is everlasting. As a young boy, Florentino Ariza is captivated by the even younger Fermina Daza. She inspires in him a love so passionate that flows from his pen in pages and pages of love letters that leave Fermina breathless. She is slowly won over by his ardor and they begin an exchange of love letters - sometimes through acquaintances, others by hiding them throughout the city – that would leave seasoned lovers heaving.

 

But Florentino is not the man Lorenzo Daza, Fermina’s wayward father, has in mind for her. He moved her to the city to help her increase her station through a refined education and a fortuitous marriage and Florentino is found woefully lacking. While he isn’t much to look at and dresses in a dour manner, Lorenzo has his sights on someone much more elevated. Someone with a name, with status and a rank.

 

Realizing how smitten his daughter is, Lorenzo decides they need to embark on a one year trip immediately to rid her of this infatuation. They travel endlessly and exhaustingly, finally ending at their cousin’s ranch. While the time spent with cousin Hildebranda is diverting, Fermina never lets Florentino wander far from her thoughts. Hildebranda even conspires to help deliver telegraph messages between the lovers.

 

As with all adventures, they must end and Fermina finds herself back home. Only a handful of days later, Florentino realizes Fermina is home and finds her one day in the market. He wanders by and whispers in her ear that this market is no place for a lady. All at once, Fermina realizes that Florentino is no better than a stranger. She doesn’t really know him at all. And he doesn’t really know her. Against her better angels, she shuns him there and then. A passionate affair of words is ended in a moment.

 

And as with all beautiful, refined women, Fermina doesn’t take long in finding a new suitor in the guise of Juvenal Urbino, a doctor. From an established family with a lengthy last name and family wealth to match, he becomes besotted with Fermina after meeting her during an exam in which her father feared she had cholera. While Fermina doesn’t take to him, Lorenzo finds in Urbino just the man he had in mind for his daughter and fans the flames of ardor.

 

In due course, Fermina warms to Urbino and after a decent interval are married. Neither are ever sure if they are truly and madly in love with one another. Fermina ticks all his boxes he had in mind for a wife and Urbino, vice versa. They learn to live and love over time but in looking back on her life Fermina is never sure if what she felt for her husband was true love.

 

During all this time Florentino has his dalliances, some wiser chosen than others. One affair in which he is a complete pedophile. But the entire course of his life, he reserves his heart for Fermina. He follows her life in society, at openings, art events, speeches she makes throughout the years. He never gives up hope that one day they will be together. And his hope is realized after 50 years of waiting when Urbino dies by falling off a ladder.

 

As a widow of society and in mourning, Florentino’s initial efforts are rebuffed but he eventually wins her over again with his letters. Lengthy and with passion, he is able to convey to her the depth of his heart once again and assure her that his love has never wavered. Although Fermina is wary, they begin a Tuesday ritual where Florentino comes to her house for evening coffee. Over time, they both begin to rely on the company and find themselves comforted by one another in their old age.

 

On a river voyage that Florentino charms her into taking, the couple succumb to love that has been waiting decades to find them. Only Marquez can say it best:

 

“…they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”

 

Beyond the absolute beauty and seduction of his writing, Marquez gives hope to the idea of passion and love even beyond a certain age. Particularly in the West, we consider these notions as the property of the young, but Marquez brings us the hope of love, passion, sex even in our agedness, when your parts stop working and you even have the smell of decay. Regardless, the heart endures and doesn’t cease to beat until your last breath.