Exploring Love and Death in Gabriel García Márquez’s Novel
Love and Death in Love in the Time of Cholera:
0. General Considerations About Love and Death
The novel is about the passage of time and love, presented with all possible variants: love bright, hopeful, troubled, dark, romantic, dissatisfied, passionate, sexual… The story is a perfect time that tries to force a love as stubborn as Florentino Ariza’s for Fermina Daza. This reminds us of love, as sung in his splendid Quevedo sonnet, “Love Beyond Death”: a love that surpasses the limits of time and could keep shaking even after death. Love, the protagonist of the novel, dwells in the heart of Florentino Ariza, who is taken to his eternal love (Fermina Daza) on the day of the funeral of her husband, Juvenal Urbino. The fear of death could leave Florentino’s love unfinished, but it overcomes the notion that death would win the war of love. Not so; love wins. He feels this faded and old telegraph, who, fifty years ago, remained enthralled with the figure of that girl he wanted from then and forever. Whether one (Florentino) or the other (Fermina) becomes the two major themes in Love in the Time of Cholera. There is no love without death. Love in the Time of Cholera can be described as a love story, but also a story about death. Most significant is the fact that the story opens with a suicide and closes, in a final 18-page segment, with news of another suicide: America, the last of Florentino Ariza’s mistresses. There is a double view of the topic. It is very revealing in this sense, the beautiful statement of the narrator: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” What is told in the book is, above all, a love story that only death can end. Dying of love was the desire of Florentino, expressed through a written text in which he stated: “The only thing that hurts me to die is not of love.” With the death of Juvenal Urbino, Florentino respects the wish of his beloved, who sees the opportunity to achieve his postponed aspirations. That death is the resumption of outstanding love strategies and the end of a long wait: “Fermina, I have waited this time for over half a century to repeat once again my vow of eternal fidelity and love forever.” In short, Florentino spent his life proving that love is more consistent than the idea of death and old age, achieving his purpose.
1.1. Platonic Love
The love between the main characters in the novel, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, begins as a fervent love full of mysteries. However, the attraction between them remains after the “journey of forgetting.” Before this happens, we must admit that Fermina feels an irrepressible curiosity about the puzzle that is Florentino. Fermina comes to fall in love with Florentino Ariza. Of course, reflection on reality puts things in place; reality advises Fermina to end that relationship, as the flamboyant poet of love is a stranger. Florentino Ariza does not succumb to Fermina’s decision. On the contrary, he will always live anointed by memory, constancy, and fidelity. His conviction is so emphatic that he will haunt the idea of getting his beloved until his last breath of hope. His love will survive the vicissitudes of the years and the major setbacks of chance and the indifference of his beloved, who decides to marry Juvenal Urbino. After the trip undertaken by Fermina, the delusion maintained during her absence fades, and she decides not to maintain the relationship. The rejection does not cause a resigned withdrawal from the poet-lover, but he thinks that, sooner or later, Fermina will be his. The love of the two characters ultimately gives way to reality. When Fermina goes on her “medical trip” (the journey of forgetting), the pain in Florentino’s heart is so great that even the violin with which he serenades her, dogs, and the landscape of grief spread and silence. The thwarted love of sadness flows everywhere. Some of the reactions caused by the excessive love of Florentino Ariza are:
- Idealization of the beloved character’s low self-esteem and spite.
- Never stopping to think about the beloved.
- Quijotism. Florentino’s ravings make him a sort of Don Quixote of love. And like a disillusioned Quixote, he retreats to a shelter of love, a kind of Sierra Morena Caribbean: “The only thing left from that setback to Florentino Ariza was the refuge of love, the Lighthouse.”
1.2. The Feeling and Love as the Goal
It’s proverbial how Florentino Ariza shows loyalty to the figure of the beloved and to his own feelings. Not having many opportunities to express his emotion, he lets it lapse along the path of poetry and letters. Until that point comes the need to declare his love for Fermina Daza, who is dedicated to free love by writing letters to her lovers. Despite his obsession with the beloved, we know he feels something deep enough for a woman, Leona Cassiani, with whom he engages in sex. The feeling of Florentino comes to the comic:
- Florentino Ariza was determined to buy the mirror of Don Sancho’s Inn because he saw reflected the image of Fermina Daza.
- “Fermina Daza went down to the kitchen, among the cheers of the crew, and prepared a dish named Florentino Ariza for him to love: eggplant.”
1.3. Love Without Love or Love the Way
Florentino Ariza comes to understand what the narrator calls “love without love.” To conclude that nothing can be done against Fermina’s strong and unexpected decision to forget him, he begins a series of adventures. The formula will be to replace lyrical love with a love of bed. He enters the lives of women who love without love, without commitment, full of feelings and emotions that arise from the heart. Remedies mitigating the pain caused by Fermina’s disdain will result in a succession of secret adventures. Thus, Florentino replaces the love of a pipe dream with a love found in a few adventures. The names of the lovers are as follows:
- Rosalba, a “helpless little bird whose name I knew and with whom I barely managed to live frantic midnight…”
- Leona Cassiani, with whom he did not love, despite being “the woman in his life.”
- Some widows, such as the widow of Nazareth.
- Other lovers, including a male and Latin Andrea Vicuña.
The beloved plays the role of alleviating the plight of unrequited love through the exercise of love without love. We attend a series of episodes in which love appears as sexual love, love of the street, or relief for a need for love. Sometimes, tenderness also inhabits the occasional lover’s heart. The narrator tells how Florentino Ariza, held in isolation for so many instant and frantic loves, was touched by the effects of a love that went beyond the bed. This feeling is what draws Olimpia Zuleta. It was the only time since his early days when he was pierced by a spear of love. Finally, we note that Dr. Juvenal Urbino also engages in relationships outside marriage, with Barbara Lynch. This infidelity damages the relationship between the spouses, which thereafter raises jealousy, suspicion, mistrust, and guilt.
1.4. Conventional Love of Husband and Wife
Juvenal Urbino, in love with Fermina Daza, dazzled by her charms, asks her to marry him. Thus begins a short married life filled with emotions and deep feelings, yet lyrically empty. Both spouses live a domesticated routine of love dotted with crises. Although Fermina states that, having to re-elect a man to live with, she would choose her husband among all the men in the world. Moreover, Dr. Juvenal Urbino declares to his wife, seconds before his death: “God knows how much I loved you.” In reality, Fermina and Juvenal choose each other, but she cannot understand why this choice compares to the unconditional love of Florentino Ariza. When she decides to marry, she closes all doors to anything other than the traditional precept of “till death do us part.”
2. Death
As events unfold, Florentino Ariza expects to get the chance to win back the heart of his beloved. While waiting, his rival in love dies. Florentino, who has less fear of old age and death, believes that he can achieve his deferred love. There is one certainty: he was so loving he could not die. Death takes on importance in Love in the Time of Cholera because it is the narrative event that modifies the course of events. Juvenal Urbino dies, and immediately Florentino Ariza, the eternal candidate, begins to implement his strategies for approaching the widow. Thus, the novel can be divided into two parts, perfectly defined by the border of the widow of Fermina Daza. The two strongest deaths happen in the novel very differently: the death of Jeremiah is planned, while Dr. Urbino’s death is grotesque and slightly epic. The dramatic feeling that death inspires in the physician contrasts with the form of dying from it. We also reference the death of America Vicuña. From the point of view of narrative structure, the event counted as news in a telegram closes the loop structure of the story: the death at first, and death at the end of the novel. There can be no shared love (Fermina Daza and America Vicuña), since Florentino has achieved the most desired of all: the great love.