2.9.21 - Love in the Time of Cholera

“It is life, more than death, that has no limits.” (348) 

Utterly magnificent. A rich, orchestral swell of romance that rises at once and does not cease its torrent of wit and beauty until it climaxes at the last word. Love in the Time of Cholera might be the best novel I’ve ever read. I’m pretty sure it’s the best-written. Without a doubt it is the most beautiful. I don’t quite know how to describe what Gabo accomplishes here. With effortless flow, we are led in a dance that celebrates human life and love, and that takes place everywhere — inside individual souls across time and space; in society; through personal lenses that color the omniscient narration; floating like a satellite between the planetary movement of our bodies. The exercise affirms the root of love, and joy, in pain. It also affirms that in the end, it is worth it.

[Florentino Ariza] remembered Ángeles Alfaro, the most ephemeral and best loved of them all, who came for six months to teach string instruments at the Music School and who spent moonlit nights with him on the flat roof of her house, as naked as the day she was born, playing the most beautiful suites in all music on a cello whose voice became human between her golden thighs. From the first moonlit night, both of them broke their hearts in the fierce love of inexperience. But Ángeles Alfaro left as she had come, with her tender sex and her sinner’s cello, on an ocean liner that flew the flag of oblivion, and all that remained of her on the moonlit roofs were a fluttered farewell with a white handkerchief like a solitary sad dove on the horizon, as if she were a verse from the Poetic Festival. 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. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.” He wept copious tears at the grief of parting. But as soon as the ship had disappeared over the horizon, the memory of Fermina Daza once again occupied all his space. (270)

As an object of craftsmanship, this novel is astounding. There are no seams or dead ends. It’s not just the writing on a sentence-to-sentence level, though I’m not sure I’ve read better prose. It’s also the way he makes ordinary descriptions of human life seem like glints of divinity, like how rippling water looks like a bed of jewels. When Florentino Ariza shits his brains out in the backseat of his own car, “It was like being reborn.” (305) Fermina Daza is “Thinking while she slept” while in a state of processing grief. (50) In the poor area of town, “two thirds of the population lived in shanties at the edge of the swamps and relieved themselves in the open air. The excrement dried in the sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas in the cool, gentle breezes of December.” (109) Florentino’s shabby attire is “worthy of a rabbi in disgrace.” (129) This passage killed me:

[Juvenal Urbino] was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate. She heard him on their wedding night, while she lay prostrate with seasickness in the stateroom on the ship that was carrying them to France, and the sound of his stallion’s stream seemed so potent, so replete with authority, that it increased her terror of the devastation to come. That memory often returned to her as the years weakened the stream, for she could never resign herself to his wetting the rim of the toilet bowl each time he used it. Dr. Urbino tried to convince her, with arguments readily understandable to anyone who wished to understand them, that the mishap was not repeated every day through carelessness on his part, as she insisted, but because of organic reasons: as a young man his stream was so defined and so direct that when he was at school he won contests for marksmanship in filling bottles, but with the ravages of age it was not only decreasing, it was also becoming oblique and scattered, and had at last turned into a fantastic fountain, impossible to control despite his many efforts to direct it. (30)

The book is written the way I’d like the gods to look at us: empathetic and sympathetic, as exploding parts of a whole, with all time as one point in space.

[Fermina and her cousin, both young] smoked long, thin highwayman’s cigars that Hildebranda had hidden in the lining of her trunk, and afterward they had to burn Armenian paper to purify the rank smell they left behind in the bedroom. Fermina Daza had smoked for the first time in the Valledupar, and had continued in Fonseca and Riohacha, where as many as ten cousins would lock themselves in a room to talk about men and to smoke. She learned to smoke backward, with the lit end in her mouth, the way men smoked at night during the wars so that the glow of their cigarettes would not betray them. But she had never smoked alone. With Hildebranda in her house, she smoked every night before going to sleep, and it was then that she acquired the habit although she always hid it, even from her husband and her children, not only because it was though improper for a woman to smoke in public but because she associated the pleasure with secrecy. (128)

One important stylistic device is to describe an event that links up with the plot, and then digress naturally into the backstory of that particular quirk or scar or habit or appearance. It gives the sensation of being immersed in an eternal river and exploring the rounded edges of the stones. It’s a world-building device I’ve seen in Wes Anderson movies but never knew the origins of.

The city’s first electrical plant’s vibration was a constant earthquake. Not even Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with all his prestige, could persuade them to move it where it would not disturb anyone, until his proven complicity with Divine Providence interceded on his behalf. One night the boiler in the plant blew up in a fearful explosion, flew over the new houses, sailed across half the city, and destroyed the largest gallery in the former convent of St. Julian the Hospitaler. The old ruined building had been abandoned at the beginning of the year, but the boiler caused the deaths of four prisoners who had escaped from the local jail earlier that night and were hiding in the chapel. (230)

The blend of the intense and the quotidian — and the good and the bad — is what grounds García Márquez’s baroque language in the soil, and keeps it from ever feeling pretentious, or a reach.

In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the satiable lovers kissing on the open terraces, and still he told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. 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. (106)

With effortless fluency, Gabo alights on the evil and the sublime with the same tenor, the same mosaic calm, as if to say that they are the same thing. They’re both simply what life feels like. His joy is flecked with pain, and vice versa. After a trying period in their marriage:

They knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public waht the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore. (224)

At the root of García Márquez’s wisdom is the constant presence of death. “A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.” (170) “Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.” (276)

From that moment on, Florentino Ariza began to see her with different eyes. The years were passing for her too. Her abundant sexuality was withering without glory, her lovemaking was slowed by her sobbing, and her eyelids were beginning to darken with old bitterness. She was yesterday’s flower. (200)

This passage, one of the few that dealt in real horror, goddamn knocked me out.

It was a demented trip. The first stage along the ridges of the Sierra Nevada, riding muleback in a caravan of Andean mule drivers, lasted eleven days, during which time they were stupefied by the naked sun or drenched by the horizontal October rains and almost always petrified by the numbing vapors rising from the precipices. On the third day a mule maddened by gadflies fell into a ravine with its rider, dragging along the entire line, and the screams of the man and his pack of seven animals tied to one another continued to rebound along the cliffs and gullies for several hours after the disaster, and continued to resound for years and years in the memory of Fermina Daza. (83)

Interestingly, he never really employs gallows humor. That would be too preferential towards life; too afraid of oblivion. The voice in which he creates this summary waterfall of human life is beyond death. It is the voice of nature itself, taking the shape of an old costeño ghost, turning its gaze on our world and issuing a romance of epic familiarity. A god shooting the shit. 194 long section on chinese This is a parable of human history. Rejected due to tribalism, appreciated with rancor, and eventually discarded as part of the past. One of the most salient themes of the novel is old age: its humiliations and its joys. (I loved this: “Without realizing it, he was beginning to defer his problems in the hope that death would resolve them.” (316) Gabriel García Márquez wrote this book in his late fifties, and it’s clear that he was coming to terms with what life would be like as an old man.

Dr. Urbino Daza made several digressions on the subject of aging. He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people. He said: “Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.” He foresaw a more humanitarian and by the same token a more civilized future in which men and women would be isolated in marginal cities when they could no longer take care of themselves so that they might be spared the humiliation, suffering, and frightful loneliness of old age. From the medical point of view, according to him, the proper age limit would be seventy. [Ari Emanuel!!] But until they reached that degree of charity, the only solution was nursing homes, where the old could console each other and share their likes and dislikes, their habits and sorrows, safe from their natural disagreements with the younger generation. He said: “Old people, with other old people, are not so old.” (312)

We the reader see no questioning about old age, though, or depressive wrestling: the author has his answer. And his answer is a resounding affirmation that old age is just another phase of life, full of unique challenges and joys like every other — to those who are open to them. “Human beings are not born once and for all the day their mothers give birth to them. Life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (165) The plot of the novel itself is a simple, beautiful story. In the late 1800s, in an unnamed city that resembles Cartagena, a young firecracker named Fermina Daza snatches the attention of the hopelessly, melodramatically romantic young man named Florentino Ariza. (His childhood in a whorehouse and his penchant for high romantic writing makes him a likely stand-in for the author.) The two briefly carry on a correspondence, until her bootlegger father, Lorenzo Daza, conspires to end the affair so she can marry up. In a sit-down with Florentino Ariza, he tells the young man to lay off.

Lorenzo Daza leaned back in his chair, his eyelids reddened and damp, and his left eye spun in its orbit and stayed twisted toward the outside. He, too, lowered his voice. 

“Don’t force me to shoot you,” he said. 

Florentino Ariza felt his intestines filling with cold froth. But his voice did not tremble because he felt himself illuminated by the Holy Spirit. (82)

After Fermina Daza is sent away, she comes back and realizes she’s grown out of her infatuation with Florentino. She goes on to marry Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the town’s most prominent citizen and a genuinely good man, even though, hilariously, we get glimpses at people’s true feelings about him and they’re not always great. When Urbino dies in old age, Florentino Ariza — having done nothing with his life but prepare for the moment when he could court Fermina Daza again — is there to try to win her heart for good this time. Ultimately, he succeeds in wheedling his way into her graces with his profound love letters.

It was the first time in half a century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity, and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death [of Fermina Daza’s husband], 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. (305)

But eventually, when Florentino Ariza succeeds in convincing a bored, lonely, infuriated old Fermina Daza to go on a riverboat trip with him, where they gloriously consummate his lifelong efforts:

He reached out with two icy fingers in the darkness, felt for the other hand in the darkness, and found it waiting for him. Both were lucid enough to realize, at the same fleeting instant, that the hands made of old bones were not the hands they had imagined before touching. In the next moment, however, they were. She began to speak of her dead husband in the present tense, as if he were alive, and 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 without a master. (329)

The book’s closing is one of the most gorgeous I have ever read. I’m not crying, you're crying!!! I can’t say enough about the majesty of this work. It is a simple and true pleasure to dip into the stream of García Márquez’s words and let the power of human life — and its continuing joy, as long as we are alive — wash over you. 

 “Human beings are not born once and for all the day their mothers give birth to them. Life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (165)