Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail.

“I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says.

All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The virginity he mentions is not physical. This is Marquez’s magical realism!

When Florentino first saw Fermina, she was only a schoolgirl accompanied by her aunt on the way to and back from school. He gathers enough courage one day to profess his love to the girl who eventually nods her assent with the support of her aunt. But when she is out of school, just old enough to marry, her father arranges her marriage with Dr Juvenal Urbino. After the initial hesitation and resistance as well as a protracted and strategic European tour with her father, the young girl is made to come to the realisation that Dr Urbino will suit her better than a jobless and officially fatherless Florentino.

The heartbroken Florentino is redeemed by the passionate sex imposed upon him by an unknown woman in a ship. Being stripped of his virginity very unceremoniously and then dismissed with an imperious order – “Now go and forget all about it, this never happened” – Florentino is both confused and elated. The experience teaches him that “his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion.”

Women come and go in his life thereafter as if he is the god of love that draws all voluptuous women to himself. From Rosalba in her muslin dress who unbuttoned his trousers and impaled herself on him in the darkness of a ship’s cabin, it was a glorious journey for Florentino through the sensuous valleys and alleys of paradisiacal bliss. Widows came and went opening up the floodgates of their dammed-up tenderness and immersing Florentino in eternal tides of euphoria. A lot of other women too added their own succulent music to the stormy symphony that Florentino composed day after day. Including little girl America Vicuna who was entrusted to Florentino’s tutelage by some relatives. Florentino was old enough to be her grandfather when he seduced her. This is the only relationship that becomes a weight on Florentino’s conscience later. America becomes a tragedy eventually. Florentino’s thoughtless lust is the cause though the girl’s suicide note does not implicate him in any way.

He didn’t mean to do any harm to any of these women including little America. Some of these women used him for their pleasure just as he used them for his. Some wanted love, tenderness, or perhaps long and meaningful relationships. Florentino was incapable of giving these to anyone, except Fermina. For him, all the other women in his life were just intoxicants that filled the emptiness of his life without Fermina, balms that soothed the pain of his yearning heart.

Love isn’t all that easy. Dr Urbino didn’t really love Fermina. He married her because he wanted to make a conquest of a woman who was as pretty and haughty as Fermina. A time will come when Fermina will cease to interest Dr Urbino who will then discover Miss Barbara Lynch, Doctor of Theology, whose palpitations elicit more than medical attentions from the physician. And Fermina will catch Barbara’s smell on the doctor’s clothes.

There is a lot of sex in this book. A lot of passion, rather. I understand that the Spanish word for ‘cholera’ also means ‘passion,’ something akin to the English word ‘choleric.’ Marquez’s novel is about the passion of love rather than about the virtue of love. But it moves, albeit very slowly, from passion towards virtue. At the end of the novel, we meet the two protagonists, old and haggard as they are, leaping over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and going straight to the heart of love. They are now “beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.”

PS. This post is a part of Remembering Love Blog Hop hosted by Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed.