Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Marquez also wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude along with other works. This book, Love in the Time of Cholera, was a national best seller. Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Penguin Books had this edition translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman. This book was published in 1988. Even though the cover of my copy appears intriguing, I hate the title; it actively makes me not want to read it. I committed to it because I’d heard such good things about the author. A movie was made based on this story. A personal note on the very first page reads “This book is incredible!” On the second page I wrote “With very little dialogue, this book reminds me of another one of my favorite authors, Dostoyevsky. We go deep into people’s hearts, souls and minds. What a splendored world is love. How long would you wait? How far would you go? Love has no age; no sell-by date. We do not stop loving when we age.” On the next page I wrote “This is another one of those books whose title does not reveal the humor and the love inside!”

As far as transcription, I usually just type the “best bits” that rise to the surface as outstanding writing. For this one I also included plot points (which I mark differently in the book). That was too much! I’m hoping that if you like the “best bits” you’ll feel inspired to read the entire story.

 

3  margin note: Saint Amour poisons himself

5  margin note: Dr. Juvenal Urbino is very old but still working. Memory and hearing slipping a bit.

9  “…the uproar of oil and motors from the bay whose exhaust fumes fluttered through the house on hot afternoons like an angel condemned to putrefaction.”

10  “‘The scalpel is the greatest proof of the failure of medicine.’ He thought that, in a strict sense, all medication was poison and that seventy percent of common foods hastened death.”

17  Branding (one of my literary interests discussed in my thesis) is mentioned

20  “He was a deplumed, maniacal parrot who did not speak when asked to but only when it was least expected, but when he did so with a clarity and rationality that were uncommon among human beings.”

31  “He was very glad that the instrument used by Divine Providence for that overwhelming revelation had been Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, whom he had always considered a saint unaware of his own state of grace. But when the letter revealed his true identity, his sinister past, his inconceivable powers of deception, he felt that something definitive and irrevocable had occurred in his life.”

32  “‘You don’t understand anything,’ he said. ‘What infuriates me is not what he was or what he did, but the deception he practiced on all of us for so many years.’”

37  “He remembered Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, on view at that hour in his coffin, in his bogus military uniform with his fake decoration, under the accusing eyes of the children in the portraits.”

49  Dr. Urbino is buried the day after Saint-Amour.

50  “‘Fermina,’ he said, ‘I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.’

“Fermina Daza would have thought she was facing a madman if she had not had reason to believe that at that moment Florentino Ariza was inspired by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Her first impulse was to curse him for profaning the house when the body of her husband was still warm in the grave. But the dignity of her fury held her back. ‘Get out of here,’ she said. ‘And don’t show your face again for the years of life that are left to you.’ She opened the street door, which she had begun to close, and concluded:

“‘And I hope there are very few of them.’”

51  “Only then did she realize that she had slept a long time without dying, sobbing in her sleep, and that while she slept, sobbing, she had thought more about Florentino Ariza than about her dead husband.”

Chapter endnotes:

Learn about Saint-Amour and what is revealed in his suicide note. Learn of Dr. Urbino (who dies next) and his wife, Fermina. She is visited by a man she met as a teen who says he has loved her all this time. This news did not come as a shock but she kicks him out. Even so…she thinks about him more than her dead husband all through the night.

 

53  “Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago.”

54  “…Florentino Ariza could play by ear like a professional. When he met Fermina Daza he was the most sought-after young man in his social circle…”

55  “The lesson was not interrupted, but the girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.”

57  “‘But above all,’ she said, ‘The first person you have to win over is not the girl but her aunt.’”

58  “…her aunt was convinced that all these meetings could not be casual. She said: ‘He is not going to all this trouble for me.’ For despite her austere conduct and penitential habit, Aunt Escolastica had an instinct for life and a vocation for complicity, which was her greatest virtues, and the mere idea that a man was interested in her niece awakened an irresistible emotion in her. Fermina Daza, however, was still safe from even simple curiosity about love, and the only feeling that Florentino Ariza inspired in her was a certain pity, because it seemed to her that he was sick. But her aunt told her that one had to live a long time to know a  man’s true nature, and she was convinced that the one who sat in the park to watch them walk by could only be sick with love.

“Four times a day, when they walked through the little Park of the Evangels, both hurried to look with a rapid glance at the thin, timid, unimpressive sentinel who was almost always dressed in black despite the heat and who pretended to read under the trees.”

59  “But her prayers were not answered. On the contrary. This occurred at the time that Florentino Ariza made his confession to his mother, who dissuaded him from handing Fermina Daza his seventy pages of compliments, so that she continued to wait for the rest of the year.”

62  But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.”

68  “It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them. Never in that delirious spring, or in the following year, did they have the opportunity to speak to each other. Moreover, from the moment they saw each other for the first time until he reiterated his determination a half century later, they never had the opportunity to be alone or to talk of their love. But during the first three months not one day went by that they did not write to each other, and for a time they wrote twice a day, until Aunt Escolastica became frightened by the intensity of the blaze that she herself had helped to ignite.”

69  “Sometimes he went to the office without having slept, his hair in an uproar of love after leaving the letter in the prearranged hiding place so that Fermina Daza would find it on her way to school.”

71  “Their frenetic correspondence was almost two years old when Florentino Ariza, in a letter of only one paragraph, made a formal proposal of marriage to Fermina Daza. On several occasions during the preceding six months he had sent her a white camellia…”

“…torn from the margin of a school notebook, on which a one-line answer was written in pencil: Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.”

73  “In any case, the details of the engagement were settled in their letters during the weeks that followed. Fermina Daza, on the advice of her Aunt Escolastica, accepted both the two-year extension and the condition of absolute secrecy, and suggested that Florentino Ariza ask for her hand when she finished secondary school, during the Christmas vacation. When the time came they would decide on how the engagement was to be formalized, depending on the degree of approval she obtained from her father. In the meantime, they continued to write to each other with the same ardor and frequency, but free of the turmoil they had felt before, and their letters tended toward a domestic tone that seemed appropriate to husband and wife. Nothing disturbed their dreams.”

77  “She had two children, each by a different father, not because they were casual adventures but because she could never love any man who came back after the third visit.”

78  “The fact was that on the previous Saturday, Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, had come into the class on Ideas of Cosmogony with the stealth of a serpent, and spying on the students over their shoulders, she discovered that Fermina Daza was pretending to take notes in her notebook when in reality she was writing a love letter. According to the rules of the Academy, that error was reason for expulsion.”

79  “Certain that such an intricate relationship was understandable only with the complicity of his sister, he did not grant her the grace of an excuse or the right of appeal, but shipped her on the schooner to San Juan de la Cienaga. Fermina Daza never found relief from her last memory of her aunt on the afternoon when she said goodbye in the doorway…”

“Lorenzo Daza did not foresee the ferocity with which his daughter would react to the unjust punishment of her Aunt Escolastica, whom she had always identified with the mother she could barely remember. She locked herself in her room, refused to eat or drink, and when at last he persuaded her to open the door, first with threats and then with poorly dissimulated pleading, he found a wounded panther who would never be fifteen years old again.”

“But it was like talking to a corpse. Defeated, he at last lost his temper at lunch on Monday, and while he choked back insults and blasphemies and was about to explode, she put the meat knife to her throat, without dramatics but with a steady hand and eyes so aghast that he did not dare to challenge her. That was when he took the risk of talking for five minutes, man to man, with the accursed upstart whom he did not remember ever having seen, and who had come into his life to his great sorrow. By force of habit he picked up his revolver before he went out, but he was careful to hide it under his shirt.”

81  “Get out of our way.”

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

“‘Shoot me,’ he said, with his hand on his chest. ‘There is no greater glory than to die for love.’”

Margin note: Father is taking her away. She leaves a letter in her hair braid.

86  “So the Forentino Ariza not only learned the complete itinerary but also established an extensive brotherhood of telegraph operators who would follow the trail of Fermina Daza to the last settlement in Cabo de la Vela. This allowed him to maintain intensive communications with her from the time of her arrival in Valledupar, where she stayed three months, until the end of her journey in Riohacha, a year and a half later, when Lorenzo Daza took it for granted that his daughter had at last forgotten and he decided to return home.”

88  “That was how the telegraphic correspondence with Florentino Ariza stopped being a concerto of intentions and illusory promises and became methodical and practical and more intense than ever. They set dates, established means, pledged their lives to their mutual determination to marry without consulting anyone, wherever and however they could, as soon as they were together again.”

Lorenzo Daza “never spoke to her about his plans for the arranged marriage.”

“It was at this time that Florentino Ariza decided to tell her in his letters of his determination to salvage the treasure of the sunken galleon for her.”

102 margin note: OH. NO.

103  “…opportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chance encounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and nine months and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow.”

Endnotes: Florentino and Fermina were in love all their teen/young years, but her father moved them away to break up the romance. They stayed in touch through letters. Three years later when Fermina returned to secretly marry Florentino, he caught her by surprise in the market. At just that moment, the X factor was extinguished. She saw Florentino in an entirely new light and abruptly broke off the engagement.

 

109  “To prevent anyone from drinking from the aluminum cup used to dip out the water, its edges were as jagged as the crown of a mock king.”

122 Dr. Urbino is now attempting to get close to Fermina.

“It was a brief and bitter visit. Sister Franca de la Luz, wasting no time on formalities, offered honorable reinstatement to Fermina Daza. The reason for her expulsion would be erased not only from the records but also from the memory of the Community, and this would allow her to finish her studies and receive her baccalaureate degree. Fermina Daza was perplexed and wanted to know why.

“‘It is the request of someone who deserves everything he desires and whose only sin is to make you happy,’ said the nun. ‘Do you know who that is?’

“Then she understood. She asked herself with what authority a woman who had made her life miserable because of an innocent letter served as the emissary of love, but she did not dare to speak of it. Instead she said yes, she knew that man, and by the same token she also knew that he had no right to interfere in her life.”

132  margin notes: Fermina is a homebody with no friends

“She herself had not realized that every step she took from her house to school, every spot in the city, every moment of her recent past, did not seem to exist except by the grace of Florentino Ariza. Hildebranda pointed this out to her, but she did not admit it because she never would have admitted that Florentino Ariza, for better or for worse, was the only thing that had ever happened to her in her life.”

136  margin note: Interesting how all these men are after Fermina when she herself does not seem interesting at all.

“…Doctor with a perfunctory handshake. Fermina did the same, but when she tried to withdraw her hand in its satin glove, Dr. Urbino squeezed her ring finger.

“‘I am waiting for your answer,’ he said.”

“Then Fermina pulled harder and her empty glove was left dangling in the Doctor’s hand, but she did not wait to retrieve it.”

137  “It was one of her typical letters, not a syllable too many or too few, in which she told the Doctor yes, he could speak to her father.”

138 margin note: Florentino plays one last waltz for Fermina before moving away.

142 margin note: Florintino loses his virginity to a stranger.

143  “…he could not believe, that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion.”

147  “…in the marasmus of the sedatives he had resolved once and for all that he did not give a damn about the brilliant future of the telegraph and that he would take this very same boat back to his old Street of Windows.

“Never again, because never again would he abandon the city of Fermina Daza.

149  “Florentino Ariza tried to help her unfasten her stays, but she anticipated him with a deft maneuver, for in five years of matrimonial devotion she learned to depend on herself in all phases of love, even the preliminary stages, with no help from anyone.”

Margin notes 152: Florentino begins keeping journals of his lovers

Margin notes 153: Florentina sees Fermina after her honeymoon. She is at church with her husband and pregnant.

“…which couples in the family still made love and which ones had stopped, and when, and why, even though they continued to live together.”

159  “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. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.’

Margin notes 160  Fermina and Urbino have their first child

161  “But amid these and so many other memories, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had one that he always regretted not sharing with his wife, for it came from his days as a bachelor student in Paris. It was the memory of Victor Hugo, who enjoyed an impassioned fame here that had nothing to do with his books, because someone said that he had said, although no one actually heard him say it, that our Constitution was meant for a nation not of men but of angels. From that time on, special homage was paid to him, and most of our many compatriots who traveled to France went out of their way to see him. A half-dozen students, among them Juvenal Urbino, stood guard for a time outside his residence on Avenue Eylau, and at the cafes where it was said he came without fail and never came, and at last they sent a written request for a private audience in the name of the angels of the Constitution of Rionegro. They never received a re3ply. One day, when Juvenal Urbino happened to be passing the Luxembourg Gardens, he saw him come out of the Senate with a young woman on his arm. He seemed very old, he walked with difficulty, his beard and hair were less brilliant than in his pictures, and he wore an overcoat that seemed to belong to a larger man. He did not want to ruin the memory with an impertinent greeting: he was satisfied with the almost unreal vision that he would keep for the rest of his life. When he returned to Paris as a married man, in a position to see him under more formal circumstances, Victor Hugo had already died.”

End note: We learn what happens during Fermina and Florentino’s lives when Dr. Urbino comes on the scene.

 

A plan: “The day that Florentino Ariza saw Fermina Daza in the atrium of the Cathedral, in the sixth month of her pregnancy and in full command of her new condition as a woman of the world, he made a fierce decision to win fame and fortune in order to deserve her. He did not even stop to think about the obstacle of her being married, because at the same time he decided, as if it depended on himself alone, that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had to die. He did not know when or how, but he considered it an ineluctable event that he was resolved to wait for without impatience or violence, even till the end of time.

“…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” (166).

“Inside the shell of a soulless merchant was hidden a genial lunatic…” (165-6).

169  “In the other photograph, his father was with a group of soldiers in God knows which of so many wars, and he held the longest rifle, and his mustache had a gunpowder smell that wafted out of the picture.”

176-7  “As he spoke he sipped aguardiente without pause. He seemed to be made of reinforced concrete: he was enormous, with hair all over his body except on his head, a mustache like a housepainter’s brush, a voice like a capstan, which would have been his alone, and an exquisite courtesy. But not even his body could resist the way he drank. Before they sat down to the table he had finished half of the demijohn, and he fell forward onto the tray of glasses and bottles with a slow sound of demolition.”  OMG…that is SO GOOD!

178  here I wrote “Ausencia” : “…the first thing she did when he arrived was to take off his glasses instead of undressing him, so that she could kiss him with greater ease, and this was how Florentino Ariza learned that she had begun to love him.”

188  “‘No,’ she said to him. ‘I would feel as if I were going to bed with the son I never had.’

“Florentino Ariza was left with the nagging suspicion that this was not her last word. He believed that when a woman says no, she is waiting to be urged before making her final decision, but with her he could not risk making the same mistake twice. He withdrew without protest, and even with a certain grae, which was not easy for him. From that night on, any cloud there might have been between them was dissipated without bitterness, and Florentino Ariza understood at last that it is possible to be a woman’s friend and not go to bed with her.”

191  Florentino and Dr. Juvenal meet: “…it revealed to him that he and this man, whom he had always considered his personal enemy, were victims of the same fate and shared the hazards of a common passion; they were two animals yoked together.”

200 “‘By virtue of marrying a man she does not love for money,’ interrupted Sara Noriega. ‘That’s the lowest kind of whore.’”

203 “…loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone.

“He saw no reason why Fermina Daza should not be a widow like them, prepared by life to accept him just as he was, without fantasier of guilt because of her dead husband, resolved to discover with him the other happiness of being happy twice, with one love for everyday use which would become, more and more, a miracle of being alive, and the other love that belonged to her alone, the love immunized by death against all contagion.”

204  “…but no one could remember what he was like. It was then that Fermina Daza experienced the revelation of the unconscious motives that had kept her from loving him. She said: ‘It is as if he were not a person but only a shadow.’ That is what he was: the shadow of someone whom no one had ever known.”

205  “The truth is that Juvenal Urbino’s suit had never been undertaken in the name of love, and it was curious, to say the least, that a militant Catholic like him would offer her only worldly goods: security, order, happiness, contiguous numbers that, once they were added together, might resemble love, almost be love. But they were not love, and these doubts increased her confusion, because she was also not convinced that love was really what she most needed to live.”

206  “…Fermina Daza’s happy marriage lasted as long as the honeymoon…”

“…the man she had married was a hopeless weakling: a poor devil made bold by the social weight of his family names.”

211  “…he had won the power to turn his daughter into an exquisite lady. He left old and sick, but still he lived much longer than any of his victims might have desired. Fermina Daza could not repress a sigh of relief when she received the news of his death, and in order to avoid questions she did not wear mourning, but for several months she wept with mute fury without knowing why when she locked herself in the bathroom to smoke, and it was because she was crying for him.

“The most absurd element in their situation was that they never seemed so happy in public as during those years of misery. For this was the time of their greatest victories over the subterranean hostility of a milieu that resisted accepting them as they were: different and modern, and for that reason transgressors against the traditional order. That, however, had been the easy part for Fermina Daza. Life in the world, which had caused her so much uncertainty before she was familiar with it, was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown. She had defined it in a simpler way: ‘The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.’ She had made this sudden discovery with the clarity of a revelation when, trailing her endless bridal train behind her, she had entered the vast  salon of the Social Club, where the air was thin with the mingled scent of so many flowers, the brilliance of the waltzes, the tumult of perspiring men and tremulous women who looked at her not knowing how they were going to exorcise the dazzling menace that had come to them from the outside world. She had just turned twenty-one and had done little more than leave her house to go to school, but with one look around her she understood that her adversaries were not convulsed with hatred but paralyzed by fear. Instead of frightening them even more, as she was already doing, she had the compassion to help them learn to know her. They were no different from what she wanted them to be…”

223  “Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”

End note: We learn about the individual lives and loves of Fermina and Florentino as they are apart and move forward through their lives. Florentino never married but knew many woman. Fermina was in a loveless but workable marriage and had 3 children.

The reader will enjoy a romantic interlude between pages 227-229

230  “The military man, prepared to introduce them, asked her if they did not know each other. She did not say yes and she did not say no, but she held out her hand to Florentino Ariza with a salon smile. The same thing had occurred twice in the past, and would occur again, and Florentino Ariza always accepted these occasions with a strength of character worthy of Fermina Daza. But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

Margin note 233  He hears gossip that Fermina is sick

235  “At last she decided to leave, not even knowing why or to what purpose, out of sheer fury, and he, inhibited by his sense of guilt, had not been able to dissuade her.

“When she made her rash decision, she told her children that she was going to have a change of scene for three months or so with Aunt Hildebranda, but her determination was not to return. Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew the strength of her character very well, and he was so troubled that he accepted her decision with humility as God’s punishment for the gravity of his sins. But the lights on the boat had not yet been lost to view when they both repented of their weakness.”

Two years pass

237  “Beyond any shadow of a doubt there was an odor in each of the articles that had not been there in all their years of life together, an odor impossible to define because it was not the sent of flowers or of artificial essences but of something peculiar to human nature. She said nothing, and she did not notice the odor every day, but she now sniffed at her husband’s clothing not to decide if it was ready to launder but with an unbearable anxiety that gnawed at her innermost being.”

240  “In this way she realized not only that her husband was in a state of mortal sin but that he had resolved to persist in it, since he did not go to his confessor for help. She had never imagined that she could suffer so much for something that seemed to be the absolute opposite of love, but she was suffering, and she resolved that the only way she could keep from dying was to burn out the nest of vipers that was poisoning her soul.”

“…a great relief that what was bound to happen sooner or later had happened sooner rather than later: the ghost of Miss Barbara Lynch had entered his house at last.”

241  “Miss Barbara Lynch, Doctor of Theology, was the only child of the Reverend Jonathan B. Lynch…”

248  “the last thing Miss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box wrapped in paper from the pharmacy, so that the coachman himself thought it was an emergency prescription and handed it to her with no comment, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not even by accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bitter tears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. At five o’clock, instead of going to see her, he made a profound act of contrition before his confessor, and on the following Sunday he took Communion, his heart broken but his soul at peace.”

249  “…he ended the recital of his misery with a sigh as mournful as it was sincere: ‘I think I am going to die.’ She did not even blink when she replied.

‘That would be best,’ she said. ‘Then we could both have some peace.’”

“Something definitive had happened to her while he slept: the sediment that had accumulated at the bottom of her life over the course of so many years had been stirred up by the torment of her jealousy and had floated to the surface, and it had aged her all at once.”

250  “For her it was the end of everything. She was sure that her honor was the subject of gossip even before her husband had finished his penance, and the feeling of humiliation that this produced in her was much less tolerable than the shame and anger and injustice caused by his infidelity. And worst of all, damn it: with a black woman. He corrected her: ‘With a mulatta.’ But by then if was too late for accuracy: she had finished.

‘Just as bad,’ she said, ‘and only now I understand: it was the smell of a black woman.’

“This happened on a Monday. On Friday at seven o’clock in the evening, Fermina Daza sailed away on the regular boat to San Juan de la Cienaga with only one trunk, in the company of her goddaughter, her face covered by a mantilla to avoid questions for herself and her husband. Dr. Juvenal Urbino was not at the dock, by mutual agreement, following an exhausting three-day discussion in which they decided that she should to Cousin Hildebranda Sanchez’s ranch in Flores de Maria for as long a time as she needed to think before coming to a final decision. Without knowing her reasons, the children understood it as  a trip she had often put off and that they themselves had wanted her to make for a long time. Dr. Urbino arranged matters so that no one in his perfidious circle could engage in malicious speculation, and he did it so well that if Florentino Ariza could find no clue to Fermina Daza’s disappearance it was because in fact there was none, not because he lacked the means to investigate. Her husband had no doubts that she would come home as soon as she got over her rage. But she lft certain that her rage would never end.”

254  “Dr. Juvenal Urbino made the decision to come for her after receiving a report from the Bishop…”

Fermina was so happy to see Juvenal

256 margin note: Florentino sees Fermina as she grows old

258  “As they talked, Florentino Ariza put his hand on her thigh, he began to caress her with the gentle touch of an experienced seducer, and she did not stop him, but she did not respond either, not even with a shudder for courtesy’s sake.”

“From that time on, she would say to anyone who would listen to her: ‘If you ever hear of a big, strong fellow who raped a poor black girl from the street on Drowned Men’s Jetty, one October fifteenth at about half-past eleven at night, tell him where he can find me.’ She said it out of habit, and she had said it to so many people that she no longer had any hope. Florentino Ariza had heard the story as many times as he had heard a boat sailing away in the night. By two o’clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was waiting for, and he was glad to know it.”

259  “It was the most fearful kind of presentiment, because it was based on reality. The years of immobilized waiting, of hoping for good luck, were behind him, but on the horizon he could see nothing more than the unfathomable sea of imaginary illnesses, the drop-by-drop urinations of sleepless nights, the daily death at twilight. He thought that all the moments in the day, which had once been his allies and sworn accomplices, were beginning to conspire against him. A few years before he had gone to a dangerous assignation, his heart heavy with terror of what might happen, and he had found the door unlocked and the hinges recently oiled so that he could come in without a sound, but he repented at the last moment for fear of causing a decent married woman irreparable harm by dying in her bed. So that it was reasonable to think that the woman he loved most on earth, the one he had waited for from one century to the next without a sigh of disenchantment, might not have the opportunity to lead him by the arm across a street full of lunar grave mounds and beds of windblown poppies in order to help him reach the other side of death in safety.

“It was a bad time for being young: there was a style of dress for each age, but the style of old age began soon after adolescence, and lasted until the grave.”

268  “Six months later, by unanimous agreement, Florentino Ariza was named President of the Board of Directors and General manager of the company.”

272 margin note: Pretty creepy, Florentino!

276  “…although it seemed absurd: the oldest and best-qualified doctor in the city, and one oof its illustrious men for many other meritorious reasons, had died of a broken spine, at the age of eighty-one, when he fell from the branch of a mango tree as he tried to catch a parrot.”

278  “…and on the wet envelope he recognized at once the imperious handwriting that so many changes in life had not changed, and he even thought he could detect the nocturnal perfume of withered gardenias, because after the initial shock, his heart told him everything: it was the letter he had been waiting for, without a moment’s respite, for over half a century.”

End note: Florentino’s later years and learning of Dr. Urbino’s death. He goes to tell Fermina he’ll be waiting. Three weeks later he finds a letter at his door.

 

279  “Fermina Daza could not have imagined that her letter, inspired by blind rage, would have been interpreted by Florentino Atiza as a love letter. She had put into it all the fury of which she was capable, her cruelest words, the most wounding, most unjust vilifications…

281  “At the end of the third week, in fact, she began to see the first light. But as it grew larger and brighter, she became aware that there was an evil phantom in her life who did not give her a moment’s peace. He was not the pitiable phantom who had haunted her in the Park of the Evangels and whom she had evoked with a certain tenderness after she had grown old, but the hateful phantom with his executioner’s frock coat and his hat held against his chest, whose thoughtless impertinence had disturbed her so much that she found it impossible not to think about him. Ever since her rejection of him at the age of eighteen, she had been convinced that she had left behind a seed of hatred in him that could only grow larger with time. She had always counted on that hatred, she had felt it in the air when the phantom was near, and the mere sight of him had upset and frightened her so that she never found a natural way to behave with him. On the night when he reiterated his love for her, while the flowers for her dead husband were still perfuming the house, she could not believe that his insolence wad not the first step in God knows what sinister plan for revenge.

“It was not easy for her to imagine Florentino Ariza as he had been then, much less to believe that the taciturn boy, so vulnerable in the rain, was the moth-eaten old wreck who had stood in front of her with no consideration for her situation, or the slightest respect for her grief, and had seared her soul with a flaming insult that still made it difficult for her to breathe.”

285  “Prudencia Pitre had not forgotten his scratching signal at the door, the one ha had used to identify himself when they thought they were still young although they no longer were, and she opened the door without any questions. The street was dark, he was barely visible in his black suit, his stiff hat, and his bat’s umbrella hanging over his arm, and her eyes were too weak to see him except in full light, but she recognized him by the gleam of the streetlamp on the metal frame of his eyeglasses. He looked like a merderer with blood still on his hands.

‘Sanctuary for a poor orphan,’ he said.”

302  “It seemed incredible, but as the first anniversary of her husband’s death approached, Fermina Daza felt herself entering a place that was shady, cool, quiet: the grove of the irremediable. She was not yet aware, and would not be for several months, of how much the written meditations of Florentino Ariza had helped her to recover her peace of mind. Applied to her own experiences, they were what allowed her to understand her own life and to await the designs of old age with serenity. Their meeting at the memorial Mass was a providential opportunity for her to let Florentino Ariza know that she, too, thanks to his letters of encouragement, was prepared to erase the past.”

305 margin note: they finally sit down to talk

“…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, 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. She thought that he would at last be convinced of the unreality of his dream, and that this would redeem his insolence.”

308  “She ignored his hidden intentions and returned the letter to him, saying: ‘It is a shame that I cannot read it, because the others have helped me a great deal.’”

“‘Come back whenever you like,’ she said. ‘I am almost always alone.’”

317  “Fermina Daza needed no more than three Tuesdays to realize how much she missed Florentino Ariza’s visits.”

“But for Fermina Daza no one could take the place of her calming afternoons with Florentino Ariza.”

323  “‘A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old.’”

329  “Then 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.”

“‘…there is no God worth worrying about.’”

Margin note page 331 says there is a mention of environmental damage

331  “Seeing him like this, dressed just for her in so patent a manner, she could not hold back the fiery blush that rose to her face. She was embarrassed when she greeted him, and he was more embarrassed by her embarrassment. The knowledge that they were behaving as if they were sweethearts was even more embarrassing, and the knowledge that they were both embarrassed embarrassed them so much that Captain Samaritano noticed it with a tremor of compassion.”

A ghost is mentioned on page 332

338  “‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it,’ she said, ‘but let’s do it like grownups.’”

343  “At dusk in Puerto Nare they picked up a woman who was even taller and stouter than the Captain, asn uncommon beauty who needed only a beard to be hired by a circus.”

348  “Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.”

Last end note: The wait is kind of reminiscent of The Count of Monte Cristo.