Love in Time of Cholera Essay

Time of CholeraLove, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, prompt us, love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point mortality has come good within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while both the same talking a game of eternity. Its ab erupt then that we may begin to regard love songs, romance allegorys, pocket operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, non to abduce intolerant, ear.At the alike time, where would any of us be with turn out all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that arcdegree of adolescent, premortal hope? Pretty far out on lifes limb, at to the lowest degree. Suppose, then, it were possible, not nevertheless to swear love forever, but actually to notice done on it to live a long, rich and authentic life based on such a denunciation, to put ones alloted second of precious time where ones heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel Garcia Marquezs new falsehoodLove in the Time of Cholera,one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.In the postromantic ebb of the 70s and 80s, with ein truth remains now so wised up and even growing paranoid well-nigh love, erstwhile the charming buzzword of a generation, it is a daring step for any reliever to decide to work in loves vernacular, to defecate it, with all its folly, imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously that is, as well worth those higher forms of play that we value in fiction. For Garcia Marquez the step may also be revolutionary. I think that a unfermented about love is as valid as any other, he once remarked in a conversation with his friend, the journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (published as El Olor de la Guayaba, 1982). In reality the calling of a writer the revolutionary duty, if you manage is that of writing well. And oh boy does he write well. He writes with impassioned con trol, out of a maniacal serenity the Garcimarquesian voice we study come to deal from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a train where it base at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and ing and when called upon, take dour and soar, as in this description of a turn-of-the- one C balloon tripFrom the sky they could see, just as God sawing machine them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor. They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raise d for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by everyones shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon. This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a premiss of immortality youthful idiocy, to some may yet be honored, much later in life when we ought to greet better, in the face of the undeniable. This is, effectively, to assert the resurrection of the body, today as throughout hi stratum an unavoidably revolutionary idea.through and through the ever-subversive medium of fiction, Garcia Marquez shows us how it could all plausibly come about, even wild hope for some body out here, outside a book, even as inevitably beaten at, bought and resold as we all must have become if only through years of simple residence in the injuring and corruptive world. Heres what happens. The story takes place between about 1880 and 1930, in a Caribbean seaport city, unnamed but utter to be a composite of Cartagena and Barranquilla as well, perhaps, as cities of the spirit less officially mapped.Three major(ip) characters form a triangle whose hypotenuse is Florentino Ariza, a poet dedicated to love both carnal and transcendent, though his temporal fate is with the River Company of the Caribbean and its small fleet of paddle-wheel steamboats. As a childly apprentice telegrapher he meets and falls forever in love with Fermina Daza, a beautiful adolescent with . . . almonds regulated eyes, who walks with a natural self-respect . . . her does gait making her seem immune to gravity. Though they exchange hardly a hundred words face to face, they carry on a passiona te and secret affair merely by way of garners and telegrams, even subsequently the missys father has sound out and taken her away on an extended journey of forgetting. only when when she returns, Fermina rejects the lovesick young man after all, and eventually meets and marries instead Dr. Juvenal Urbino who, like the hero of a I9th-century novel, is well born, a sharp dresser, somewhat stuck on himself but a terrific catch nonetheless. For Florentino, loves creature, this is an agonizing setback, though null fatal.Having give tongue to to love Fermina Daza forever, he settles in to wait for as long as he has to until shes impeccant once more. This turns out to be 51 years, 9 months and 4 days later, when suddenly, absurdly, on a Pentecost Sunday more or less 1930, Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies, chasing a parrot upon mango tree. After the funeral, when everyone else has left, Florentino steps forward with his hat over his heart Fermina, he declares, I have waited for this opport unity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love. Shocked and furious, Fermina orders him out of the house. And dont show your face again for the years of life that are left to you . . . I hope there are very fewer of them. The hearts eternal vow has run up against the worlds finite harm. The face-off occurs near the end of the archetypical chapter, which recounts Dr. Urbinos last day on earth and Ferminas maiden night as a widow. We then flash back 50 years, into the time of cholera. The middle chapters follow the lives of the three characters through the years of the Urbinos marriage and Florentino Arizas rise at the River Company, as one century ticks over into the next.The last chapter takes up again where the first left off, with Florentine now, in the face of what some men would consider major rejection, resolutely setting about courting Fermina Daza all over again, doing what he must to win her love. In th eir city, throughout a turbulent half-century, ending has proliferated everywhere, both as el colera, the fatal disease that sweeps through in terrible intermittent epidemics, and as la colera, defined as choler or anger, which taken to its extreme becomes warfare.Victims of one, in this book, are more than once mistaken for victims of the other. War, endlessly the same war, is presented here not as the continuation by other means of any political sympathies that can possibly matter, but as a negative force, a plague, whose only meaning is death on a massive scale. Against this dark ground, lives, so precarious, are often more and less informed projects of resistance, even of sworn opposition, to death. Dr. Urbino, like his father before him, becomes a leader in the battle against the cholera, promoting existence health measures obsessively, heroically.Fermina, more conventionally but with as much courage, soldiers on in her chosen portion of wife, mother and household manage r, maintaining a safe perimeter for her family. Florentino embraces Eros, deaths well-known long-time enemy, setting off on a career of seductions that eventually add up to 622 long term liaisons, apart from . . . unmeasured fleeting adventures, while maintaining, impervious to time, his deeper fidelity, his unquenchable hope for a life with Fermina.At the end he can tell her truthfully though she doesnt believe it for a minute that he has remained a virgin for her. So far as this is Florentinos story, in a way his Bildungsroman, we find ourselves, as he earns the suspension of our disbelief, cheering him on, wishing for the success of this stubborn warrior against age and death, and in the name of love. But like the best fictional characters, he insists on his autonomy, refusing to be anything less ambiguous than human.We must take him as he is, pursuing his tomcat destiny out among the streets and lovers refuges of this city with which he lives on terms of such easy intimacy, c arrying with him a potential for disasters from which he remains safe, immunized by a crotchety but dangerous indifference to consequences that often borders on criminal neglect. The widow Nazaret, one of many widows he is fated to make happy, seduces him during a nightlong bombardment from the cannons of an attacking army outside the city. Ausencia Santanders delicately furnished home is burgled of every movable item while she and Florentino are frolicking in bed.A girl he picks up at Carnival time turns out to be a homicidal machete-wielding escapee from the local anesthetic asylum. Olimpia Zuletas husband murders her when he sees a vulgar endearment Florentino has been thoughtless enough to write on her body in red paint. His lovers amorality causes not only individual misfortune but ecologic destruction as well as he learns by the end of the book, his River Companys insatiate appetite for firewood to fuel its steamers has wiped out the great forests that once bordered the Magd alena river system, leaving a wasteland where nothing can ive. With his mind clouded by his passion for Fermina Daza he never took the trouble to think about it, and by the time he realized the truth, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in a new river. In fact, dumb luck has as much to do with getting Florentino through as the intensity or purity of his dream. The occasions great affection for this character does not entirely overcome a sly concurrent subversion of the ethic of machismo, of which Garcia Marquez is not especially fond, having set forth it elsewhere simply as usurpation of the rights of others.Indeed, as weve come to expect from his fiction, its the women in this story who are stronger, more attuned to reality. When Florentino goes crazy with live, developing symptoms like those of cholera, it is his mother Transito Ariza, who pulls him out of it. His innumerable lecheries are rewarded not so much for any traditional masculine selling points as for his o bvious and aching consider to be loved. Women go for it. He is ugly and sad, Fermina Dazas cousin Hildebranda tells her, but he is all love. And Garcia Marquez, straight-faced cashier of tall tales, is his biographer.At the age of 19, as he has reported, the young writer underwent a literary epiphany on reading the famous opening lines of KafkasMetamorphosis,in which a man wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Gosh, exclaimed Garcia Marquez, using in Spanish a word in English we may not, thats just the way my grandmother used to talk And that, he adds is when novels began to interest him. Much of what come sic in his work to be called magical realism was, as he tells it, simply the presence of that grandmotherly voice.Nevertheless, in this novel we have come a meaningful distance from Macondo, the magical village inOne one hundred Years of Solitudewhere folks routinely sail through the air and the dead remain in everyday conversation with the living we have des cended, perhaps in some way down the same river, all the way downstream, into war and pestilence and urban confusions to the edge of a Caribbean haunted less by individual dead than by a history which has brought so appallingly many down, without ever having sopoken, or having spoken gone unheard, or having been heard, left unrecorded.As revolutionary as writing well is the duty to redeem these silences, a duty Garcia Marquez has here fulfilled with honor and compassion. It would be presumptuous to speak of sorrowful beyondOne Hundred Years of Solitudebut clearly Garcia Marquez has moved somewhere else, not least into deeper awareness of the ways in which, as Florentino comes to learn, nobody teaches life anything. There are still delightful and stunning moments different to fact, still told with the same unblinking humor presences at the foot of the bed, an anonymously delivered doll with a curse on it, the sinister parrot, almost a minor character, whose pursuit ends with the d eath of Dr. Juvenal Urbino.But the predominant claim on the authors attention and energies comes from what is not so contrary to fact, a human consensus about reality in which love and the possibility of loves extermination are the indispensable driving forces, and varieties of magic have become, if not sort of peripheral, then at least more thoughtfully deployed in the service of an expanded vision, matured, darker than before but no less clement.It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera all genres, by the way, that are well represented in this novel but not the Big L. What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level of understanding, is an authors ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the full completion of his caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.In translatingLo ve in the Time of Cholera,Edith Grossman has been solicitous to this element of discipline, among many nuances of the authors voice to which she is sensitively, imaginatively attuned. My Spanish isnt perfect, but I can tell that she catches admirably and without apparent labor the swing and translucency of his writing, its slang and its classicism, the lyrical stretches and those end-of-sentence zingers he likes to hit us with.It is a faithful and beautiful piece of work. There comes a moment, early in his career at the River Company of the Caribbean when Florentino Ariza, unable to write even a simple commercial letter without some kind of romantic poetry creeping in, is discussing the problem with his uncle Leo XII, who owns the company. Its no use, the young man protests Love is the only thing that interests me. The trouble, his uncle replies, is that without river navigation, there is no love. For Florentino, this happens to be literally true the shape of his life is defined by two momentous river voyages, half a century apart. On the first he made his decision to return and live forever in the city of Fermina Daza, to persevere in his love for as long as it might take. On the second, through a desolate landscape, he journeys into love and against time, with Fermina, at last by his side.There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetimes experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongsLove in the Time of Cholera,this shining and life-threatening novel.