A Love Can Last a Thousand Years

Love in The Time in Cholera

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Alfed E. Knopf, Inc. 348 pp.

$ 18.95

SOME months back I got a message in a fortune cookie that said, "True love can be found if you look for it." It was an odd message to receive; the conventions of our age tell us that love comes only to the young or to the lucky. The concept of true love based on committment or permanency is one from which many people in the 1980s seem to shy away.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel, Love in the Time of the Cholera, however, shows us in a humorous yet poignant way that true love is still possible. The Colombian author considers several types of love--from innocent love, to bordello love, to frustrated love, to dying love--but each form of the emotion manages to last for a lifetime.

The novel centers on an emotional triangle involving an immigrant's daughter, Fermina Daza, a brilliant young doctor, Juvenal Urbino, with, as Thomas Pynchon has written, Florentino Ariza serving "as the hypotenuse." Florentino becomes obsessed with Fermina, who is about 13, and he writes her passionate, though unsuccessful, love letters. In typical Latin American fashion, the young woman is chaperoned and kept at a safe distance from suitors. Fermina's aunt agrees to serve as a courier, however, and soon the two fall hoplessly in love, exchanging piles and piles of stamps, envelopes and surreptitious locks of braided hair.

When Fermiana's father finds out about the illicit yet innocent relationship, he sends his daughter to the countryside on a "journey of forgetting," and he warns Florentino not to write, much less speak, to his daughter again. Florentino resolves to love Fermina forever, but when he approaches her after her return from the countryside, her sentiment has obviously changed. "Instead of the commotion of love she felt the abyss of disenchantment," and Fermina cries out to him, "No please! Forget it!" His hopes dashed for love in the present, Florentino contents himself with faith in the eternal.

Fermina meanwhile marries Juvenal Urbino, a famous doctor who, having studied medicine in Paris, tries to reform the health standards of the city, which is presumed to be Cartagena or Barranquilla--on the Colombian Caribbean coast. Their match, while longlasting, is hardly ideal, and Marquez writes that "the problem with public life is overcoming terror; the problem with marriage is overcoming boredom."

OVERCOMING boredom and finding love interesting is what the three characters concentrate on for the next 50 years. Florentino seeks lust and pleasure in his experiences with his pre-teen ward, with disenchanted widows, and with prostitutes whom he refuses to pay. He shares his body with countless women, but reserves his heart for the one he loves.

Fermina and Juvenal grow to care for each other, but to escape their boredom, they each seeks adventure. Juvenal has a risky affair with a Black woman from Jamaica--a relationship considered to be taboo at that time in Colombia. Fermina locks herself in rooms and smokes cigars, thinking about love and adventure.

The broken triangle repairs itself upon the death of Urbino, who comes to his demise while chasing his parrot from a tropical tree. At the funeral, Florentino arrives to declare his undying love for the widow, and he and Fermina resume their relationship of a half century before, celebrating their union with a riverboat journey. The president of the riverboat company, Florentino has the boat's captain take advantage of the ever-present cholera epidemic to hoist the yellow flag of quarantine so that the lovers never have to disembark and can celebrate their love "forever."

Despite the fairy-tale ending of Marquez' novel, the magical realism which dominated the prose of his previous works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch is surprisingly subtle in this latest work. No sleeping women spout anger and green blood, no plagues of forgetfulness rain down upon forgotten towns. Furthermore, conversation with spirits is relatively nonexistent in Love in the Time of Cholera and babies with corkscrew tails are not to be found.

It has been said that such literature of the fantastic, which has distinguished the prose of Latin America for the past few decades, is an effort by authors to expose the problems they see with their societies and politics. Scholars have suggested that the strange and bizzare events such as deaths and disappearances that mark Latin American novels are not as fictitious as they seem to North Americans, and are, in fact, a means of exposing the regimes that oppress their countries without being obvious.

While Marquez does comment on the political situation of Colombia, as the novel takes place during a turbulent era in which the Liberal party pitted itself against the Conservative party in a series of civil wars, the repercussions of which led to intense violence and military rule in the 20th century. But in the novel, war, like the cholera, is ever present in the background.

By presenting a novel in which love prevails during a war, Marquez is posing a new political solution. In the novel, both the war and the love exist simultaneously, and there is love in the time of cholera. But one day the cholera, and the war, must end. By saying that the love can prevail, Marquez seems highly optimistic. It is possible that he is saying Latin Americans should concentrate on the positive and the eternal in their search for political peace and that they should avoid the cholera and the unpleasantness of war.