Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

One of my snooty ways of judging the literary merits of a bookstore is to check whether they stock the novels of Gabriel García Márquez under M for Márquez, or where they actually belong, under G for García Márquez. If I recall correctly, Barnes & Noble gets it wrong while Borders gets it right. Incidentally, Borders also gets credit from me for following the practice of not segregating biographies within their own category, instead interspersing them in the appropriate genre (e.g. Lincoln in U.S. history, Einstein in science).

But I digress. García Márquez is one of the few modern foreign writers who has been able to transcend the bias against works in literature and establish himself firmly in the American literary canon. In addition to his Nobel Prize, García Márquez also earned a spot in the most recent edition of Clifton Fadiman's New Lifetime Reading Plan, and had two works chosen in a recent list of the 100 Most Meaningful Books (a feat matched by Faulkner, Flaubert, Homer, Mann, and Woolf, and bested only by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Shakespeare and Tolstoy; pretty good company).

Love in the Time of Cholera is the third of García Márquez's novels that I have read. I started with his most popular work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was a big hit amongst my high school friends who read it in Spanish class, but slipped by me until I read it in the spring of my first year of law school. I certainly enjoyed it and recognized the merit of the story of Macombo and the Buendia family, but must say that it did not meet my quite lofty expectations. Even more disappointing was his slim 1994 novel about 12-year-old Sierva Maria and the priest who falls in love with her, Of Love and Other Demons. How García Márquez managed to make such a mess of a book with less than 150 pages is beyond me.

Still, Love in the Time of Cholera is so widely lauded that it seemed a mistake not to read it simply because I was put off by one of the author's lesser works. And I am glad I did. While it does not match the majestic sweep of One Hundred Years of Solitude's multi-generational narrative, it displays the author's characteristic knack for imaginative storytelling. The book opens with the visit of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a respected doctor in a South American port city on the Caribbean, to the home of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, a friend of Dr. Urbino's who has just committed suicide. After observing the body and reading the shocking information revealed in Saint-Amour's farewell letter, Dr. Urbino leaves to attend a party and contemplate the events of the day. The chapter focuses so deeply on Dr. Urbino and his thoughts that it comes as quite an abrupt surprise to see his absurd demise come that very same day:

Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ca y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.

Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo's horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried her best to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a mad woman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath:

"Only God knows how much I loved you."

It was a memorable death, and not without reason.

After Dr. Urbino's death, the story takes an unusual turn, after focusing so closely on Dr. Urbino and his deceased chess partner. For as contented as Fermina Daza may have been in her marriage, her relationship with Dr. Urbino was neither the first nor the last great love story of her life. Waiting behind as the other guests leave the funeral party at Fermina Daza's home is "a useful and serious old man" by the name of Florentino Ariza:

[B]efore she could thank him for the visit, he placed his hat over his heart, tremulous and dignified, and the abscess that had sustained his life finally burst.

"Fermina," he said, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeate to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love."

Fermina Daz would have thought she was facing a madman if she had not reason to believe that at that moment Florentino Ariza was inspired by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Her first impulse was to curse him for profaning the house when the body of her husband was still warm in the grave. But the dignity of her fury held her back. "Get out of here," she said. "And don't show your face again for the years of life that are left to you." She opened the street door, which she had begun to close, and concluded:

"And I hope there are very few of them."

Surely not the reaction Florentino Ariza had been hoping for. We soon learn that Florentino and Fermina were teenage sweethearts, and that Florentino has been waiting more than five decades for Juvenal Urbino's death to renew the pursuit. Those five decades fill much of the remainder of the book, as García Márquez details the origins of Florentino and his family, Fermina and hers, and how their clandestine epistolary relationship was abruptly halted by Fermina just as it seemed about to be realized. Florentino's professed love for Fermina never fades, despite her subsequent marriage to Dr. Urbino, her bearing of children, and the passage of decade after decade.

One of the great questions raised by the novel is whether Florentino's interminable affection for Fermina is an admirable example of love's durability or a cautionary tale about idealized obsession. García Márquez finishes the book with great panache, a talent sadly scarce amongst otherwise skilled novelists, so I am especially reluctant to discuss the final chapters which detail events after the night of Dr. Urbino's funeral party, but I think the conclusion leaves plenty of room to ponder the wisdom of Florentino's fixation.

I will note that I was rather bothered by the behavior Florentino engages in with América Vicuña, a 14-year old girl. Florentino, by then a quite aged man, is chosen by her parents as her guardian when she is sent to his town for schooling. He commences a sexual relationship with her but ends it upon the death of Dr. Urbino. The girl's subsequent emotional spiral and suicide come as little surprise, but seem to have relatively little effect on the old man. I'd like to give García Márquez the benefit of the doubt and assume this subplot is intended to demonstrate the moral depravity of Florentino, but the repetition of this theme in the author's later novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores leaves me with some doubt.