Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera (Spanish: El amor en los tiempos del cólera) is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez first published in Spanish in 1985. Alfred A. Knopf published an English translation in 1988, and an English-language movie adaptation was released in 2007.

IN his novel, “Love in the Times of Cholera”, (LTC) Gabriel Garcia Marquez compares the experience of falling in love and being in love to the pain one endures when ravaged by cholera. The title of the book, interpreted literally, would appear to point towards a time when cholera was a common epidemic in South America, particularly in the Colombian port city of Cartagena where the story unfolds, but as one reads on it is clear that the protagonists, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza,show all the symptoms of cholera after they fall in love. And Garcia Marquez finally shows his cards when he writes almost at the outset of the narrative that “His condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera. The symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.”

Garcia Marquez is one of the most celebrated and revered novelist of the 20th century. When his magnum opus, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was translated into English I was just starting my graduate studies, and had enrolled in my first computer language course in Boston. The professor, Michael Brown Beasley, was a powerful force in the classroom with his ability to teach Fortran computer language and simultaneously display his ability to get the class, more than 30 strong from different backgrounds, enraptured in his tales from “One Hundred Years”. It was not too difficult to figure out that the Colombian novelist had a magical influence on the American computer science professor. Unfortunately, my first attempts to read “One Hundred Years” was futile since the opening paragraphs were not very inviting to someone accustomed to the poetic styles of Dickens and Tagore. For my readers who are not familiar with Garcia Marquez, let me offer three quick tips to the uninitiated about his writing, without spoiling the fun of discovering his world, that one has to be prepared for: his settings (South America in the 19th century), storytelling with a substantive dose of magical realism, and non-linearity of the narrative.

In LTC, Ariza, an eighteen year old young man who works in the city's telegraph office, falls in love with Daza the daughter of a businessman. The rest of the novel is a spellbinding tale of twists and turns in their life, her marriage to Dr. Urbino, his lifelong desire to be united with her, and the final episode after her husband of more than fifty years passes on. At the superficial level, LTC is a love triangle between the two men and a woman, but to a romantic reader it a journey with a magician who takes you to the inner depths of a man torn by his love for Daza that morphs and dazzles with time. As the different stages of this relationship is unraveled, one can see that the story is not only about how the pandemic of cholera casts a shadow over the pre-industrial society, but also how love itself can be a state of mind that is eviscerated by cholera.

Just after Ariza falls in love he starts to show many of the symptoms of cholera: sleeplessness, restless, inability to eat or digest, and loss of weight. His mother, with whom he stays, is convinced that her son has contacted cholera and tries the utmost to give him the antidotes for cholera. At other times but over the next few years, from time to time, he also shows other signs of the disease, suchas fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and headaches.Since Colombia has witnessed several episodes of cholera during the sixty years covered in the novel,Ariza is considered by all who are ignorant of his secret love for Daza as a lifelong victim of cholera defying all the advances of medical science and advances in medicine.

In addition, Ariza during his fifty years of waiting for Daza shows many other indications of being both physically and mentally ill. His irrationality is on display when he takes a steam boat to take up his job as a telegraph operator at a remote destination, in Villa de Leyva, a dreamy city more than twenty day's journey away. However, once he reaches his new post, he changes his mind, and persuades the Captain to offer him return passage to Cartagena. Even after Daza gets married and is happily settled in her married life, he keeps on nurturing his dreams to win her back. But he also realizes that the only way he can claim her back is if she becomes a widow, and he is not without remorse for these evil thoughts. He says, “What hurts me is that he has to die” and she would suffer the pain of widowhood. And Daza is not without her own misfortunes in conjugal life. However, she accepts her plight, and to quote Garcia Marquez, “ One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it.”

The book retains its crisp pace even as we move from the late nineteenth century to early twentieth, since it is evident that the symptoms of Ariza's love for Daza remain intact over time and show no signs of waning even as he ages and his “sickness” adversely affects his condition, suffuses all aspects of his life, and even threatens his very existence. A quick summary of his mental state will aptly paint the picture: When he was young, andfalls into devastating love, “Neither one could do anything except think about the other, and dream about the other.” Then when he was in his middle age, and catches Daza getting off the boat he feels “shaken by a seismic tremor that tore his head”. Finally, afterthe death of her husband, he gains the courage to approach her and renew his love for Daza and, on the first night of her widowhood, hemusters the courage to “repeat his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love”. However, subsequent to this event, he alsodoes not sleep a single night for two weeks since he could not bear to think of the pain that Daza might be experiencing in her solitary life, without him by her side to comfort her! And, ironically, all this after she had already rebuked him for his audacity and his shameless offering of love to a widow at Urbino's wake.

At other times, we find Ariza wandering aimlessly though the city's streets, almost like a vagabond and a man in the final throes of death, searching for her and hoping to get a glimpse of Daza.However much the symptoms of cholera are displayed in these descriptions, Ariza as a man in love suffers even more in what we do not see. The non-visible or hidden afflictions of love are strewn all over the place. After fifty years or unrequited love,he has the air of a man eaten away by a disease. His does not end with Daza jilting him, with her marriage, with the years passing, and his realization that he might pass on or she might before she becomes a widow and available again. The pangs and the ravages of love that he endures would have totally emasculated any other man but he fights on and keeps the fire burning at the age of seventy six, not to mention his hundreds of casual affairs which serve as an antidote.

But, at the end they find each other, or are reunited with each other and make a journey on a steamboat named New Fidelity of RCC up the river. And ironically, their love is cemented by faking they have cholera.  Ariza has the captain lie to the Health Department and inform them that all the passengers have cholera and, as a measure of quarantine, ply up and down the river with the yellow flag on its mast to signal its status as a boat with passengers sick with cholera.A magical ending to a masterfully crafted love story!

Dr. Abdullah Shibli lives and
works in Boston, USA