Love in the Time of Cholera

“Neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer.” 

This passage describes the love of Fermina Daza and Juvenal Urbino after decades of marriage. Neither Fermina nor Urbino are entirely sure if love can explain their continued marriage, particularly in old age; they are both afraid to acknowledge that they were never in love in the first place and that they just sought marriage as a form of stability. This fear reveals the significance of true passion and genuine love to both Fermina and Urbino and foreshadows Fermina’s eventual return to Florentino Ariza.

“The incident, of course, gave them the opportunity to evoke many other trivial quarrels from many other dim and turbulent dawns. Resentments stirred up other resentments, reopened old scars, turned them into fresh wounds, and both were dismayed at the desolating proof that in so many years of conjugal battling they had done little more than nurture their rancor.” 

A minor argument early in their marriage gives Fermina Daza and Urbino the opportunity to realize that, in their marriage, they hold onto years of unspoken pain and resentment. After a minor disagreement over soap, the realization of so much latent pain surprises them both; they both thought they were in love, but the conflict forces to them to view their relationship honestly, with all of its flaws and dysfunction.

“She also knew that he was one of the musicians in the choir, and although she never dared raise her eyes to look at him during Mass, she had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone, the violin played for her alone.” 

As the love between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza deepens, she begins to understand the depth of their connection in the most mundane of daily occurrences. At this moment, Fermina realizes that Florentino Ariza is playing his violin in the orchestra for her alone. It conveys the depth of his love for her, and her attentiveness to the smallest signs of that love. 

“Many displayed in their nudity traces of their past: scars of knife thrusts in the belly, starbursts of gunshot wounds, ridges of the razor cuts of love, Caesarean sections sewn up by butchers.”

In this passage, the omniscient narrator of the novel describes the scarred bodies of the prostitutes Florentino encounters at the hotel where he would go to read love poetry at night. They carry their indicators of their pasts on their bodies, and Florentino understands that the wounds of the past are all part of their love; this observation draws the reader’s attention to the theme of love and suffering. 

“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.”

After their love affair is exposed, Fermina Daza is taken away to stay with her cousin to escape the memory of Florentino Ariza; during this period of separation, she realizes that she does not need love to be happy. Though at this moment, Fermina appears strong and determined to maintain her emotional independence, she experiences an ongoing internal conflict. Fermina’s yearning for romance battles with her own self-sufficient character, making her a deeply complex character.

“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.” 

When Juvenal Urbino returns from Europe to his home city, he is struck by the way that nostalgia removes all the dirt and grime from his memories of his beloved city. He is disgusted, in many ways, by a city that he remembers so fondly when he is far away. At the time of remembering, Urbino does not realize that nostalgia is a way of coping with homesickness and grief, and his love of his city is intertwined with feelings of painful longing. 

“He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love.” 

Urbino admits in this passage that he did not love his wife before their wedding and that he only admired her, but he is optimistic that this pragmatism will develop into love. In describing his openminded attitude towards romance, the narrator reveals that Urbino’s attitude towards love is very different to that of Fermina Dazas’s, hinting at an incompatibility that may or may not be resolvable. 

“…but he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” 

In this passage, the narrator reflects on the way that people grow over time. Florentino Ariza, in particular, becomes a man after enduring the pain of losing Fermina Daza. To the narrator, these moments of growth are a kind of rebirth; by the time Florentino is old, he is unrecognizable from his earlier form. 

“But they were not in love, and these doubts increased her confusion, because she was also not convinced that love was really what she most needed to live.” 

The narrator reveals Fermina’s reflections on the love letters she receives from Florentino Ariza. They feel superficial to her, and this suspicion leads her to realize that his communications do not inspire true love in her, just the illusion of love. Fermina and Florentino are different in their understanding and appreciation of love; he appears to need love more than Fermina. 

“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.” 

This passage reveals the perceptions of Juvenal Urbino, who struggles with the emotional strain of his marriage to Fermina. He talks here about the challenges of maintaining intimacy and passion after years together, during which any married couple must navigate resentments, dissatisfaction, and disappointment. 

“Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant.”

After the death of her husband, Fermina Daza realizes that, despite her status and wealth, she has lost her identity. She feels she was a servant to him who catered to his whims while he was alive, caring for the house and for his lifestyle. The narrator suggests that Fermina’s role as a servant with prestige is the fate of married women in general. 

“All the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearance in his body. He felt the shape of his liver with such clarity that he could tell its size without touching it. He felt the dozing cat’s purr of his kidneys, he felt the iridescent brilliance of his vesicles, he felt the humming blood in his arteries.” 

As he ages and moves closer to death, Juvenal Urbino begins to feel the physical ailments of his dying patients in his own body. The symptoms enable Urbino to experience a physical connection to the aging process while his deepening sense of hypochondria prepares him for death. 

“‘I am almost one hundred years old, and I have seen everything change, even the position of the stars in the universe, but I have not seen anything change yet in this country,’ he would say. ‘Here they make new constitutions, new laws, new wars every three months, but we are still in colonial times.’” 

This quote comes from Uncle Leo XII near his death. After one hundred years of life in Colombia, he claims that, despite civil unrest, nothing has changed in his home country. Uncle Leo XII believes that Colombia is still a nation defined by its past and its many conflicts. 

“With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.” 

Florentino Ariza learns about the expansiveness of his love while he is with one of his many lovers. Previously, Florentino experiences internal conflict over the love he feels for Fermina Daza while he feels love for other women; in this moment, Florentino understands that he is capable of many loves and that each love, and lover, is unique. These other loves do not dilute his love for Fermina; they simply co-exist alongside it.

“She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.” 

In the grief of losing her husband, Fermina Daza struggles with the discovery that she has lost her identity in her long marriage to Urbino. She has lost herself in so many years of service to her husband, and part of her grief comes from the struggle to find her old self after decades without it. 

“She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.” 

Fermina Daza’s experience of grief colors her experience of love, and the narrator compares her to a ghost to emphasize her anguish and isolation. Fermina feels the darkness of death just as much as her husband, or somehow, even more; by employing this metaphor of a ghost, the narrator suggests that Urbino is at peace while Fermina roams their empty house, restless and unsettled by her condition.

“He had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.” 

Florentino Ariza realizes that in order to win over the love of his life, he has to teach her about the value of love. Fermina, in her commitment to her own independence, devalues the significance of true love. Florentino desires her to understand that love is not a means to an end, like her marriage, but a state of being that exists in the present and only for itself. 

“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.” 

This quote from Juvenal Urbino reflects his perspective on love. When he expresses this belief to his wife, in some ways, she agrees with him, though Fermina Daza’s experience of love is more expansive than her husband’s. In this passage, García Márquez distinguishes between love and marriage—love can exist without marriage, and marriage can exist without love. 

“They had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren.” 

As Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza begin their love affair for the second time, they are not bonded by youthful ardor, but by nostalgia and a shared fear of death. They recreate their old love in their current bodies, though they are distant from their younger selves. In this way, they travel through time and space with their love, suggesting a fantastical, supernatural element to their love.

“‘Everything in the world has changed,’ she said. ‘I have not,’ he said. ‘Have you?’” 

Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza discuss the existence of their love, and when she tries to explain that their love cannot exist, Florentino responds by telling her that love is timeless. The essence of their old selves have not changed though their bodies have aged. This argument is typical of Florentino’s romantic idealism. 

“If we widows have any advantage, it is that there is no one left to give us orders.” 

Fermina Daza reflects on the freedom women experience when their husbands die. She thinks about her grief as, in some ways, beneficial, because she is now in charge of her own life again. Her pragmatism after the death of Urbino suggests that their marriage, for her, was a relationship characterized by transactions and convenience, in contrast to the senseless passion that characterizes her youthful attachment to Florentino. 

“Yes: he too, like his sister Ofelia, thought there was an age at which love began to be indecent.” 

When Florentino Ariza stays on the boat to accompany Fermina Daza on her journey, the young Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino Daza, Fermina’s son, is disgusted by their attraction to one another. He and his sister Ofelia both share a distaste for the love that exists between two elderly people. Their love goes against the traditional imagery of love as a young person’s game and violates the norms of what they believe old age should be. 

“Florentino Ariza knew then that for her, too, the time had come to ask herself with dignity, with majesty, with an irrepressible desire to live, what she should do with the love that had been left behind.” 

The narrator reveals Florentino Ariza’s understanding of Fermina’s state of mind and the potential for love he believes she possesses. While Fermina struggles to know what to do with her capacity for love after losing her husband, Florentino recognizes that she has a natural, deeply human desire for love.