Love in the Time of Adolescence

In the second section of the novel Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez tells us a twisted story of love, obsession, and what it means to grow up. He crafts a setting—nineteenth century Columbia—and uses the binding culture and rule of courtship in said setting to produce a believable tale of desperate young infatuation. Márquez uses powerful language to portray the obsessive love of a meek bastard child named Florentino Ariza for the beautiful, charming, and maturing Fermina Daza.

Surrounded by a culture with a very rigid standard for the behavior of young women, Fermina Daza barely has room to breathe. Every time Márquez tells us about the girl, she is engaged in a routine activity, such as her walk to school or her daily reading lessons with her aunt. Never do we see playing, by herself or with other kids, like children should. She is always with her Aunt Escolástica, “and her behavior indicated that she was permitted no distraction” (56). Her father is so oppressive, he does not even permit her to go to a local dance “a few days after their arrival in the city” (57). When Florentino Ariza appears in her life, he is likely a delightful distraction for the girl. He is her break from her routine. However, caught up in games with her Aunt, like locating which spot Florentino is watching her from each day, Fermina doesn’t notice when “the diversion [becomes] a preoccupation and her blood [froths] with the need to see him” (58). Her intelligence, hindered by boredom from repetition, becomes a breeding ground for curiosity, and said curiosity has the potential to consume her.

Curiosity grows and eventually moves into obsession on both sides when Florentino and Fermina begin exchanging letters. When Aunt Escolástica tells her that Florentino will likely give her a letter, her curiosity is evident in her prayers to God that he will have “the courage to hand her the letter just so she could know what it said” (59). When the exchange finally takes place, the small letter leaves her rereading it and rereading it to try and find more, to satisfy her lust for information about the mysterious suitor. Márquez foreshadows the infatuation to come by saying, “his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love” (66). As their letter exchange becomes a daily happening, they are both infected by love in the form of curiosity, each wondering what the next letter will say. Fermina Daza has found something to occupy her mind rather than school; she often tries to write notes in class. She is either waiting to see what a letter says or wondering what to write back. The need to hide her letters from school nuns and her father also adds a certain thrill. Her life up until the entrance of Florentino Ariza had been dominated by her father’s goal to, “turn his daughter into a great lady” and the “appearance of Florentino Ariza had been an unforeseen obstacle in his hard-fought plan” (81). What is an obstacle to Lorenzo Daza’s is a beautiful form of entertainment for Fermina Daza.

When Fermina's father discovers the love between her and Florentino and takes her away on a long journey, his goal is that she will forget her love of Florentino. In essence, he uproots her entire life. She has no sense of the familiar; on their long mule ride, she laments that she will miss “the consolation of his letters” (83). Stolen from everything she knows, she cannot help but burst into tears when she finally reaches her cousin’s house and find eleven letters from her love waiting for her. Being that all her belongings fell into a ravine with a line of mules on her journey with her father, the letters are literally her only connection to home. Feeling secure in her correspondence with the man she believes she will marry, Fermina “[learns] about herself, she [feels] free for the first time, she [feels] herself befriended and protected” (87). She is learning to live without love; Florentino is no longer her escape from boredom, but rather a comforting tie to what she has left behind. Márquez tells us how Fermina learns that “one could be happy not only without love, but despite it” (87), foreshadowing that Fermina will no longer need Florentino when she finally returns. At age seventeen, her father finally decides to go home, and he “[turns] over to [Fermina] the keys to [her] life” (97). No longer oppressed, free to roam the market, free to live her life with all her god-given grace and beauty, Florentino suddenly becomes an annoying reminder of her younger years. The moment he appears, interrupting her blissful afternoon, she realizes that she no longer has any want or need for the obsessive love of Florentino Ariza in her life. (829)