Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A torrent of writing. A cloudburst of writing. That’s the feature of the book that remains most highlighted in my mind.
Very intense. From the first to the last page, the same intensity is maintained without a moment’s relenting.
Filled with detailed perceptions, insights, powerful lines, original observations, touching and beautiful lines and a rare kind of philosophy.

Despite all the above, the whole is not as great as its parts.
For many reasons.
First of all, its not so much a story of love, but it’s a story of waiting for the reciprocation of love.
Though unusual, its a love story of perpetual waiting – 340 pages of waiting, to be precise.
Secondly, if it were a poignant story, it would have been so much better.
But the writing evokes, no sympathy for Florentino Ariza, the helpless lover whose love is unrequited.
It’s the author’s character sketching of Florentino Ariza to be precise: it does nothing to evoke sympathy for the lost lover –nothing to endear him to the audience.
And lastly, the climax – of union between 2 lovers is not particularly delightful, neither touching, nor moving as it is difficult for any reader to relate to love blossoming between a 72 year old and a 76 year old, the way they fumble and falter as they try to make love.
But there could not have been any other ending.

Although there is so much packed into the book, a love story, there is nothing dramatic about the turn of events in the story. The way it unfolds, it is as real as reality. yet it is power packed.

The vivid details, including those of the daily life of the characters make you feel you are witnessing their lives from close quarters.

To summarize the story, Florentino Ariza loves Fermina Daza. She reciprocates his love initially but upon seeing him closely for the first time, she is disillusioned and turns her face away. In due time, she gets married to Dr. Urbino and assumes her role as his wife and homemaker. But Florentino Ariza continues to wait for her, hoping one day he will unite with her. After half a century, Dr. Urbino dies while trying to rescue a parrot in his garden. Florentino makes his entry in Fermina Daza’s life, and though rebuffed by her initially, succeeds in claiming her in the end.
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Living at a time when it is considered wise to move on in life, I wonder if there is a point in waiting for a love for half a century, almost a lifetime.

Perhaps ten years ago, I would have been in awe of the protagonist who waits a lifetime for his love.
I did surely live in a time when people did not move on within 2 days of a break up, when one night stands and wham-bam-thank-you-mam affairs were unheard of.
But today, I find it a futility, (unable to appreciate) the ideal of waiting for an impossible love anymore. I find it difficult to romanticize the ideal of waiting forever.

Is the ideal of waiting forever a noble one?
Like so many other arrangements of today – born out of our incapacity to adjust, make sacrifices, and because of which we invent alternate arrangements of convenience, which we then condition our minds to believe as correct, practical or pragmatic – is ‘moving on’ a mere convenience or really the right way of living?

Is this waiting, being loyal to one and only one person all one’s life, regardless of reciprocity, an ideal or an ideal foolishly romanticized?
Or is it that our minds and hearts conditioned by habit to this moving on practise of our present time and lives, make it seem so?

Is this work a foolish romanticizing of ‘waiting for you’ or an ode to the ideal of ‘eternal love’, I cannot help wondering living as I am in times when moving on is the practise, the norm among people.
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As in all stories, the geography and period in which the story is set add much to the charm of the work.
Here too, the details of the ways of a people, their society, their culture, their geography are interesting, intriguing, charming and enriching, based as they are on reality and set as they are in a remote past; a past of scientific primitiveness – when telegraph was a means of communication and a science of the future, mules were used for travelling, planes were still a novelty, cholera was rampant, photography nascent, river navigation still popular,...

The book takes you to old world charm of tradition and tribes.
...In this fertile province, ...the visitors slept wherever they happened to be at nightfall, and they ate wherever they happened to be hungry, for these were houses with open doors, where there was always a hammock hanging and a three meat stew simmering on the stove in case guests arrived before the telegram announcing their arrival did, as was almost always the case...

...she begged him not to call again. Her reasons were valid. There were so few telephones in the city that all communication took place through an operator who knew all the subscribers, their lives, their miracles, and it did not matter if they were not at home: she would find them wherever they might be. In return for such efficiency she kept herself informed of their conversations, she uncovered the secrets, the best-kept dramas of their private lives, and it was not unusual for her to interrupt a conversation in order to express her point of view or to calm tempers...

...the sea seemed paved with aluminium because of the numbers of fish brought to the surface by mullein...the use of the mullein plant to put the fish to sleep had been prohibited by law since colonial times, but it continued to be a common practise among the fishermen of the Carribean until it was replaced by dynamite...

...For a long time, the water in the cisterns had been honoured as the cause of the scrotal hernia that so many men in the city endured not only without embarrassment but with a certain patriotic insolence...the sight of men with ruptures sitting in their doorways on hot afternoons, fanning their enormous testicle as if it were a child sleeping between their legs...

...from the time cholera proclamation was issued, the local garrison shot a cannon from the fortress every quarter hour, day and night, in accordance with the local superstition that gunpowder purified the atmosphere...

It was a time when society was conservative as to not allow boys and girls to meet freely without the presence of a chaperone, and even the meeting between an old widow and a elderly gentleman was looked at with the feeling of resentment by children of the widow.
It was a time when ladies of decent families were expected to learn the piano.

A time when widows were expected to lead austere lives and they did so voluntarily...
...(after becoming a widow) In one of her attacks of simplification, she had relegated to the stables the radio console that her husband had given her as an anniversary gift, and which both of them had intended to present to the Museum as the first in the city. In the gloom of her mourning she had resolved not to use it again, for a widow bearing her family names could not listen to any kind of music without offending the memory of the dead, even if she did so in private...
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There are lines in the book that seem to be made for me. They define me.

‘...she wept for the first time since the afternoon of the disaster, without witnesses, which was the only way she wept...’

‘...Florentino Ariza wrote everything with so much passion that even official documents seemed to be about love. His bills of lading were rhymed no matter how he tried to avoid it and routine business letters had a lyrical spirit that diminished their authority...he made a supreme effort to learn the mundane simplicity of mercantile prose,...but at the end of six months, no matter how hard he twisted, he could not wring the neck of his die hard swan...’

I am Florentino Ariza.
Though this is a poor example, I still remember, in my very first project in my career, I had surprised colleagues by logging a test result as ‘the page takes eternity to load’...
Even after so many years in the profession, I have been reprimanded for the lyricism of my documents.

‘...he fulfilled all his duties with admirable skill studying every thread in that mysterious warp that had so much to do with the offices of poetry, but he never won the honour he most desired, which was to write one, just one, acceptable business letter. Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet...’

And the line...“The dramas he had read so often regained their original magic when he replaced the imaginary protagonists with people he knew in real life, reserving for himself and Fermina Daza the roles of star crossed lovers...”
All of us do this, but I think I take it too far. I can still recollect the sensation of weeping the whole night and wet my pillow after watching Titanic, imagining ‘someone’ to be sinking to the bottom of the sea, as I released my grip of him, never to see him again.
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The agony and anxiety of love is expressed in all love stories.
But the vividity in which it is explored here, the ‘microscopic view’, so to speak, of a mind in love, provides some wonderful insights into the psyche of a person in love, exposing its curious philosophies, it’s many deceptions and tricks, its morphing of reasoning and logic into something strange, its colouring of the whole field of view in the colour of love, it’s pitiability that’s unlike any other, it’s heights of desperation, it’s moments of self control before falling into eternal helplessness and more.

...He experienced the cruelty of time not so much in his own flesh as in the imperceptible changes he discerned in Fermina Daza each time he saw her...

...the military man, prepared to introduce her to Florentino Ariza, asked her if she did not know him. She did not say yes, did not say no, but held out her hand to him with a salon smile. The same thing had occurred twice, and Florentino .... he asked himself, with his infinite capacity of illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love...

...little by little, he idealized her, endowing her with improbable virtues and imaginary sentiments and after two weeks he thought of nothing else but her...

...He was not the kind of man she would have chosen. His foundling’s eyeglasses, his clerical garb, his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love...

...this was not only due to her limited time and the danger of being taken by surprise, it was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and continue themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship’s log. In reality, they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while he (Florentino Ariza) burned himself alive in every line...

...his heart played one of the whorish tricks that only hearts can play...

...a mule, maddened by gadflies, fell into a ravine, dragging along the entire line...pack of seven animals(tied together)... In the centuries long instant of the fall, until the scream of terror was extinguished to the bottom, she did not think of the poor dead mule driver or his mangled pack but of how unfortunate it was that the mule she was riding had not been tied to the others as well...

...he had been too young to know...the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past...but when he...saw the white promontory of the colonial district again,...did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia...

...He saw them round the corner of the store, followed by the mules carrying their trunks, their hatboxes, and the baby’s cage, and soon afterword he saw them ascend along the edge of the precipice like a line of ants and disappear from his life.........
Then he felt alone in the world, and the memory of Fermina Daza lying in ambush in recent days, dealt him a mortal blow...

...He did not sleep again...and if at times he sat down to pick at food it was...to deny her (Fermina Daza) the homage of fasting for her sake...

...Florentino Ariza, prostrate with grief, had gone to the farthest corner of the deck where the noise of the revelry could not reach him...he had awakened at five that morning, as the condemned man awakens at dawn on the day of his execution, and for that entire day he had done nothing but imagine minute by minute, each of the events at Fermina Daza’s wedding...

...He continued to hunt the abandoned little birds of the night for years, hoping to find a cure for the pain of Fermina Daza. But by then he could no longer tell if his habit of fornicating without hope was a mental necessity or a simple vice of the body...
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I like the philosophy in the following lines. Some are known to the world, yet others are the author’s discovery or invention and surely impressive whether or not agreeable.

...Widows...in the restorative idleness of solitude, on the other hand, the widows discovered that the honourable way to live was at the body’s bidding, eating only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams and they woke alone...

...one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them...

... It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not...

...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 than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good...

...They spent their lives proclaiming their proud origins, the historic merits of the city, the value of its relics, its heroism, its beauty, but they were blind to the decay of the years. Dr. Juvenal Urbino on the other hand loved it enough to see it with the eyes of truth... how noble this city must be, for we have spent four hundred years trying to finish it off and still have not succeeded...

...When someone accused him of being rich, he said, “No, not rich, I am a poor man with money which is not the same thing...

...love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. You are either born knowing how or you never know...

...nothing in the world was more difficult than love...

...it is better to arrive in time than to be invited...

...cats do not remember anyone...

...one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them...

...nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies...

...think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself...

...the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness but stability...

...Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest...

... Too much love is as bad for this as no love at all...

...love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death...

...there was no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age...

...It is a pity to still find a suicide that is not for love...

...the only thing worse than bad health is a bad name...

...the only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love...

...the only thing he had to learn about love – that nobody teaches life anything...
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I like the choice of adjective in this line.
...picture postcards of furious sunset –
An unusual adjective as in Arundhati Roy’s ‘immodest’ green.

Nice Simile.
...It was a tangible look that touched him as if it were a finger...

The below observation is peculiar –
...He went to sleep when it was almost 3 O’ clock. But first he enjoyed the immediate pleasure of smelling a secret garden in his urine that had been purified by lukewarm asparagus...
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I noted the below lines, for I liked them for one or another reason...

...while the most demanding families were satisfied if their drivers had a clean shirt, he still required coachman to wear livery of faded velvet and a top hat like a circus ringmaster’s which, more than an anachronism, was thought to show a lack of compassion in the dog days of the Caribbean summer...

...she has been discovering the uncertainty of her husband’s step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood. That was why she did not treat him like a difficult old man but as a senile baby, and that deception was providential for the two of them because it put them beyond the reach of pity...

...for many years she had erased him from her life... this was the first time she saw him clearly, purified by forgetfulness...

...he had a dreamer’s eyelashes that could make the stones sigh...

...Fermina Daza showed her cousin the place where she had suddenly discovered that her love was nothing more than an illusion. She herself had not realized that every step she took from her house to school, every spot in the city, every moment of her recent past, did not seem to exist except by the grace of Florentino Ariza... she did not admit it because she never would have admitted that Florentino Ariza, for better or for worse, was the only thing that had ever happened to her in her life...

He persuaded her to let themselves be observed while they made love, to replace the conventional missionary position with the bicycle on the sea, or the chicken on the grill, or the drawn and quartered angel, and they almost broke their necks when the cords snapped as they were trying to devise something new in a hammock. The lessons were to no avail. She was a fearless apprentice but lacked all talent for guided fornication. She never understood the charm of serenity in bed, never had a moment of invention, and her orgasms were inopportune and epidermic: an uninspired lay...

He began his first caresses...he took her hand, cold and twitching...took several hours...very slowly as he won her body’s confidence millimetre by millimetre...

...He was aware that he did not lover her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake...

...jealousy was unknown in his house...he had often boasted in public that he was like those Swedish matches that light only with their own box...

...cure for baldness...first as bald as a melon, then with more hair than a lion...

...she was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind...
He had told her something she could not imagine: the amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was...

...the desire to forget him was the strongest inducement for remembering him...

...warm with sleep in her swaddling clothes and still smelling of the cradle’s tantrums...

... A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old...