Love, Death, and Fidelity in Times of Cholera
Love and Death in *El amor en los tiempos del cólera*
The story’s content deals with the passage of time and love that comes in all possible ways: bright, hopeful, troubled, dark, disappointing love. This novel is a labor of love, but also of death. The fact that the work opens with a suicide and closes with the news of another is not pure chance.
Fermina Daza: The Embodiment of Love
The real engine of the love story is Fermina Daza, who embodies love and is the object of affection for the other two main characters.
Types of Love in the Novel
- Passionate Love (Youth): This is an idealized, courtly, medieval love, taken to its ultimate expression in the Romantic period. It is incompatible with marriage and is characterized by passion, madness, service, and the absence or mismatch of the beloved. It is marked by fatality and represented by Florentino Ariza. In “the journey of forgetting,” Fermina keeps in touch with him through letters. Florentino takes time to return them, which Fermina interprets as a mismatch. He gets sick with symptoms that are mistaken for cholera.
- Love-Tedium (Adulthood, Social Stage): Between Fermina Daza and Juvenal Urbino, love is domesticated, with no stress, passion, or love. It is characterized by boredom or frustration, rooted in a crush. Fermina marries for fear of being single. In the end, however, they cannot live without each other. It is unclear whether for convenience or easement. The purpose of marriage is not happiness but “matrimonial peace.”
- Love-Friendship (Maturity): Between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, as elderly individuals, they struggle against a society that forbids love to the elderly. The conquest by letters includes reflections on aging and the passage of time, a love that culminates in a boat trip on the Magdalena River.
- Other Types of Love (Sexual Conquest): Florentino Ariza’s relationships with his many mistresses serve to show his love as a complex feeling. He loves many but is faithful to Fermina.
Death in the Novel
Death is also present in the novel. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour does not kill himself for love, but he is helped by his beloved. In the later pages, América Vicuña commits suicide for love. Florentino Ariza feels he is dying of love for Fermina Daza.
Fidelity, Infidelity, and Loyalty
The concepts of fidelity, infidelity, and loyalty play a significant role.
It is paradoxical to talk about loyalty when the two male characters maintain multiple relationships. Juvenal Urbino has an affair with Barbara Lynch, resulting in a marriage crisis and a barrage of anger and silence. Florentino Ariza’s flirtations with more than 600 women do not stop his love for Fermina, and she never knows of these acts.
Loyalty in the secondary character of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s lover leads her to help him die as a “taste,” and his dog stays with him until the end.
Anger, Death, and Time
Anger and death go hand in hand in the work, and in the title of the work, “cholera” is a synonym for death. Death manifests in violent deaths, such as suicides out of spite or for not withstanding the ravages of age. Florentino Ariza awaits the opportunity to win back the heart of his beloved. During the wait, something more subtle happens: time has played a grisly role and has turned him into an irreparable old man. Florentino, who was so loving, could not die. He is reckless and careless in the face of old age.
The Paramount Importance of Death
Death becomes of paramount importance; it is the narrative event that changes the course of events. At Juvenal Urbino’s death, Florentino Ariza, the eternal candidate, begins to implement his strategies to approach the widow. The two strongest deaths in the novel happen very differently: Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s is a planned death, and Juvenal Urbino’s is more grotesque and epic. The treaty with América Vicuña closes this time; the event is recounted telegraphically as news and closes the circle of the narrative structure. It is an achievement of ultimate love because love cannot be shared.