Love in the time of Cholera is different to every other book I read and for that, alone, I am glad to have read it. Set across decades around the turn of the 20th Century, amid the plagues, wars and the environmental catastrophes of Caribbean Columbia, the story is of lives full of lusty passion. The thing is, I originally read this book in 1985 when it first came out and I was young and naive. Times have changed and I have changed and in the post ‘me too’ environment ‘Love in the time of Cholera’ feels like a misnomer. ‘Dysfunctional sexual obsession in the time of Cholera’ is more accurate, though not so catchy a title.
It’s not love if you harass a woman who has turned you down after you’ve sent her a million drippy letters and played the violin outside her window, and then fixate over her for fifty years, even after she marries another man and gets on with her life. It is not love if you take woman after woman (proud of not paying them) because you’re horny, or sad, or bored, expecting them to open the door naked, at any time, and welcome you to bed. It’s not love if you don’t always remember protection, except always with your thirteen-year-old ward because it would be really bad to get her pregnant. ‘He led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse.’ That’s rape, not love, but this is Florentino Ariza and he is the hero of our story. What are we meant to feel for him?
The childhood crush is Fermina Daza, also a manipulative piece of work, though I feel slightly more sorry for her, being a woman in the age when being female was a precarious thing and manipulation was one of the few tools she had to control her life. After playing very hard-to-get (they’re both kids at this stage) she eventually returns Florentino’s gushing letters in which he is almost hysterically passionate. But then she bumps into him as he stalks her, realises what a creep his is, and ruins his life. She erased him from her life with a wave of her hand. “No, please,” she said to him. “Forget it.”
She marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino, again, after many clear refusals. ‘No’, for a man in this story, just means he has to push a little harder.
This Dr Urbino is the third character who tells us his story. He travels to Europe and gets sophisticated, comes home to find things need fixing. The filth of the city for one, which feeds into the water and causes the cholera, which ferments in the city like the feverish sexual conquests. I’m not sure why such a man, who we are led to believe could choose to woo any woman of the city, and perhaps find one with a more reputable father, falls so decidedly for Fermina – I think her influence on these two men is a way to show her extraordinary sex appeal. They know nothing about her other than her haughty refusals of them, which makes them wild with desire. Maybe it’s a Latin thing.
So, do they love each other, this now married couple? They have a tumultuous relationship with lots of intense emotions but nothing that really feels like love. They selfishly take what they can from each other with little evidence of empathy.
All this aching tropical passion; with the players such a bunch of drama queens makes captivating reading. These predatory attitudes are historic, right?
The setting is spectacular and the writing of it sublime, with the foul-smelling sewers of a crumbling colonial city, tropical heat, large yellow flowers and iguanas sunning themselves on stone walls. Florentino Ariza takes two trips, years apart, up the Magdalena river to what is now Bogota and describes the effects of exploitation on the landscape:
The river became muddy and narrow, and instead of the tangle of colossal trees that had astonished Florentino Ariza on his first voyage, there were calcinated flatlands stripped of entire forests that had been devoured by the boilers of the riverboats, and the debris of god-forsaken villages whose streets remained flooded even in the cruelest droughts. At night they were awakened not by the siren songs of manatees on the sandy banks but by the nauseating stench of corpses floating down to the sea. … Instead of the screeching of the parrots and the riotous noise of invisible monkeys, which at one time had intensified the stifling midday heat, all that was left was the vast silence of the ravaged land.
This is the story of crumbling glory and the layers mount up like a gaudy oil painting. Cholera and love are both sicknesses. Both the empire and the lovers are ageing and losing their strength and their attractiveness. But even when geriatric, for our love-machine Florentino, love still means sex. However, when at last she recovered her self-possession in the perfumed oasis of her cabin, they made the tranquil, wholesome love of experienced grandparents…beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.
He’s a man with an addiction, Florentino, and he grooms and discards women with disastrous consequences. Disastrous for the women, that is, as sex tended to be for women in history, before we took control of our fertility and consent. He goes on pursuing his one great ‘love’ all his life until finally she is in his arms. Then he tells her he is a virgin.
Yeah, right.
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