Fifty-One Years, Nine Months and Four Days

Gabriel García Márquez published Love in the Time of Cholera in 1985. Its plot can be stated in a sentence, and the sentence is a trap.

Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza as a young man. She marries Dr Juvenal Urbino instead. Florentino waits for her husband to die, and on the day of the funeral he presents himself to the widow and repeats his vow. He has waited fifty-one years, nine months and four days, and he tells her the figure, because he has been counting.

Described that way it is the most romantic premise in modern literature. Now add the details the novel provides without comment.

During those fifty-one years, Florentino records his affairs in a notebook. There are six hundred and twenty-two of them. One is with a girl he is responsible for as a guardian, and it ends in her death. He continues to describe himself, throughout, as faithful.

A love measured to the day and a ledger of six hundred and twenty-two entries are not two unrelated facts about a man. They are the same habit of mind: precision, accumulation, a life organised as a set of numbers directed at a woman who is not present. The novel places them beside each other and says nothing at all.

The question the book refuses to answer is what Florentino is faithful to.

Fermina Daza lives fifty-one years. She marries, raises children, runs a household, becomes a different person several times over, and grows old. The woman Florentino is devoted to is the one he saw when they were both very young, maintained without revision across half a century against all available evidence. Whether that is the greatest fidelity in literature or the most complete refusal to meet another human being is exactly what the reader has to decide, and the novel declines to help.

The ending is built with the same care. García Márquez gives his love story to two people in their seventies, on a riverboat, and the boat flies the flag of cholera so that it will not be permitted to dock anywhere. The love that has waited fifty-one years to begin can only continue if it never lands.

That is either the most romantic image in the book or the most damning, and it is deliberately both.

Which closes this book of the course, because the four writers disagree in a way that is worth stating plainly.

The troubadours say that longing improves the lover and that fulfilment would ruin it. Austen says that love becomes possible once the arithmetic is settled, and that it consists of seeing another person accurately. Tolstoy says the cost of a love is set by the society around it rather than by the feeling, and that the same act is priced differently depending on who commits it.

García Márquez takes the troubadour position, extends it to fifty-one years and six hundred and twenty-two affairs, and puts the result on a boat that cannot dock. He is not refuting them. He is showing you what that theory looks like when somebody actually lives it, and letting you decide whether you admire it.