I just finished Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the time of cholera'. Published in Spanish in 1985 and in English a few years later, it's been seen as many things, including a testimony to the power of a lifelong love, much in the spirit of Isabel Allende's more recent 'The Japanese lover'. Unlike the latter, the lovers are united a half century later, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
It begins as a Romeo-and-Juliet story in the 1880s in an imaginary South American city modeled in part on Cartagena. Florentino and Fermina, two shy adolescents, meet and fall for each other and carry on a romance primarily by means of passionate letters and telegrams. Her father, alarmed at her involvement with an unpromising suitor, takes her away until her feelings seem to subside. On her return, he matches her with Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a much more suitable 'catch'. The two men could not be more unlike each other: Florentino is a fiery poet, full of feeling both spiritual and profane; in contrast, Dr. Urbino is calm, rational, and devoted to improving the world. (There is something about him that makes it more natural to call him Dr. Urbino, and not Juvenal.) His goal is to wipe out the illness cholera, which ravages the area. The word has a double meaning, as la cholera also refers to rage, and in a broader way to passion. So Dr. Urbino is devoted to wiping away both the ravages of a disease, and one suspects, passion in all things, including his marriage.
Some fifty-one years later, Dr. Urbino dies in a senseless way, falling off a ladder while trying to retrieve the family's pet parrot from a tree. On the day of the funeral, as everyone is leaving, Florentino appears and declares his love for Fermina. Furious at being approached at such a moment, she sends him away.
At this point the story jumps back to describe what has been happening since the two were first separated so many years ago. Florentino goes to work for his uncle at the riverboat company, and ultimately becomes the boss. The paddle boats burn firewood, and over the decades they consume all the trees until the riverbank becomes a wasteland. For Florentino, yet one more kind of fire has consumed all, and suggests the end of passion, if not of life. In the meantime the cholera rages on, as does seemingly endless warfare, twin plagues that last so long that they begin to feel like the natural order of things. Another presence throughout the book is the Magdalena River, on which Florentino's boats paddle far into mysterious and remote locales.
It also turns out that both men are not quite what they seem. Florentino is not just Romeo, largely defined by his love for Juliet. In fact he is a bit of a philanderer, who with a precision that belies his impulsive poetic nature, has kept careful count and announces that he has had 622 romantic liaisons, plus many more casual encounters. The straight-laced Dr. Urbino had had an affair with a patient, and liked to read literature sympathetic to the Nazis.
Ultimately, Florentino's pursuit of Fermina is successful, and the aging couple embark on a journey in a way too beautiful to describe (and to give away here). Marquez has explored the possibility that declarations of love made in youth when, death seems remote, can have meaning in old age when infirmity is just around the corner. The book is a heady exploration of how a mix of passion, rationality and social expectations, brewed together in the shadow of mortality, resulted in something the young lovers never could have imagined.
