Abstract
‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ by Gabriel García Márquez is a story of enduring passion from the ‘cataclysm of love’ in pubescence to impending senescence. It starts in a ‘heart skip’ of a moment between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, then ‘on a tout perdu’, when the love affair is discovered and she marries the local GP, Dr Lorenza Daza.
The setting is in a port somewhere near the Caribbean Sea and the Magdalena River, 5000 miles from the cholera outbreak near Broad Street in the Soho district of London in 1854. The opening chapter carries the smell of burnt almonds and the spectre of death to Dr Daza, conjuring up images of undergraduate toxicology.
The book celebrates suicide, death, disease, suffering, promiscuity, elation and finally, the possibility of consummation of love. The exotic characters hail from a romantic, but turbulent era in a country torn apart by civil war, revolution, deprivation and pestilence. All these social ills are the mere fodder of daily general practice to this worthy local figure and GP. His gloriously extravagant lifestyle and human excesses including his bedside manner would render him quite unfit to practise in any contemporary health care system, but he remains a national hero committed to the eradication of cholera.
While some accounts are comedic, other experiences reflect beauty and horror in equal measure with prose on war, ‘They are ‘nothing more than the struggles of the poor, driven like oxen by the landowners, against barefoot soldiers, who were driven in turn by the government’. His powerful rhetoric conveys love and compassion for those confronting mortality. He knows pain and loss, which is transferred to Dr Daza’s widow. ‘Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence, where he no longer was.’
Márquez empathises that ‘Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies’ and desperately clings to his spirituality ‘Be calm. God awaits you at the door’. Straight from the heart, he concludes, ‘The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love’.
In 1982, the Colombian author was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his novels and short stories. He developed Alzheimer’s and died from pneumonia in 2014 aged 87.