A Miserable Victory

From the moment Florentino Ariza first saw Fermina Daza, he ruined his chances to be happy in life. His mad love for her, an obsession that stemmed from the feeling that she was always just out of reach, could not be satisfied by the girl who saw him as no more than a distraction from the boredom of her repetitive life. Florentino Ariza forfeits innumerable opportunities to be happy with love throughout his life in his determination to one day be loved by Fermina Daza.

Because Florentino Ariza chose to see his affairs as only a distraction from his heart’s true love, he overlooks the fact that the affairs could have actually led him into love. The night an unidentified woman takes Florentino’s virginity onboard the Pius V Loayza, Florentino realizes that “his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion” (143). Throughout the course of his life, Florentino moved on to have over six hundred affairs, not including one-night stands. He becomes a master at seducing, making up for his timid character by using a “trap of pity” that became “the downfall for so many of [his] defenseless victims” (224). Rather than using his careful trap and the knowledge acquired from spending so much time with women to find love, however, Florentino is determined to remain faithful to Fermina in mind and heart. For instance, when love is literally right in front of his face in the form of Leona Cassiani, he denies the chance to be happy until it is too late. Upon first meeting, he accuses her of being a whore; later, after years of working with Leona and coming to respect “the fascinating spectacle of the that fierce black woman smeared with shit and love in the fever of battle”, he begins to regret that she is not a whore so that he could “wipe his ass with his principles and make love to her even if it cost nuggets of shining gold” (187). Florentino Ariza is so consumed by the love he is sure he will one day win over from Fermina Daza that by the time he confronts Leona to seduce her, he discovers that love had given up on them. The maturity she gained with age out grew the immaturity he retained in his love for a girl from his teenage years. Though Leona arguably could have been Florentino Ariza’s soul mate, he throws away his chances because of a miserable obsession that he has allowed to control every aspect of his life.

Florentino Ariza denies yet another invitation into happiness and love when he allows his lover’s insulting of Fermina Daza to affect him personally. Florentino meets said lover, Sara Noriega, at the Poetic Festival where she deeply pities his loss of the contest. They bonded over photograph albums and poetry; they were like-souls who shared the same passions. Once they begin to make love, Florentino “[realizes] that he [has] begun to love her” (196). Their passions are so in line with their love, they even write a poem about their “divided love” together and submit it to the Poetic Festival (199). When the poem loses, however, their five-year relationship also dies; Sara is convinced that Fermina Daza had plotted against them and calls her a whore. Florentino’s heart has always belonged to Fermina, and the fact that she reads off the winners of the Poetic Festival has been his only reason for attending annually. Having the lover he met at the competition insult the woman he was really attending the competition to see forces him to “see her with different eyes” (200). Florentino has never been rejected by any woman but Fermina, and so upon realizing that his relationship with Sara is over, he plans that Sara will “let him into her bed so that he could tell her no, that everything was over” (201). The idea blows up in his face, and he is rejected instead, a suiting punishment for the fact that he gave up not only on a lover, but also on a chance to be content with another woman. Though Florentino’s determined love for Fermina rewards him in the end, it is a miserable victory compared to the love he could have had in his prime and youthful years. (716)