Words, the magic of letters as incantations that can and will transfigure the world, are the starting point of this novel about old age and love. According to the author:
As I approached sixty, I... realized I was becoming more and more like my parents were when I first knew them.... I wanted to... write a book that was totally romantic. And without being afraid of using the elements of romanticism: melodrama and sentimentality.... Since I was a little boy I had heard my parents tell stories about their love affair, and these stories always appeared to me a little ridiculous. As I came close to sixty, they seemed less ridiculous to me. They appeared more sublime and more beautiful.
And so, one of the male protagonists, the hero of Love in the Time of Cholera, Florentino Ariza, is based on the author's father, Gabriel Eligio García, who became the telegraph operator of García Márquez's hometown of Aracataca, Colombia. The female protagonist, Fermina Daza, drawn from the author's mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán--still alive in Colombia at age eighty-four--is the latest incarnation of that breed of unyielding matriarchs who stride and trudge across Macondo and the author's other landscapes, implacable creatures of immediate and tangible worlds, concerned with textures, tastes, smells, oblivious to words, the worlds of men, ideas, abstractions, nonsense notions such as honor, courage, and especially love. For in García Márquez, more often than not, those who dream and swoon are the Emma Bovarys; those who live by the spoken, the written word, are men.
Unlike beautiful Fermina with the almond-shaped eyes, striding like a majestic, golden doe through the fetid, teeming streets of a decaying prototypical Caribbean-city-cum-Cartagena-de-Indias, her suitor, Florentino Ariza, glides behind her like a shadow, sad, ugly, "almost invisible with his air of a hipped dog," wearing "clothing worthy of a rabbi in disgrace." García Márquez's description of Florentino reminds one of a Colombian critic's description of García Márquez himself as a "costeño triste y timido," a sad and timid man from the coast--but one with the boldness to conjure Don Quixote's own "gente endiablada y descomunal," outrageous beings, demons, dreams without shame or measure. As boundless as García Márquez's creatures will be Florentino's unrequited love, a love that he will hoard and nurture for more than fifty years.
Sad little Florentino, the embarassing presence that Fermina dismisses "as if he were not a person but only a shadow," will--after fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days of waiting--take over the novel just as he will take over Fermina. From obscure telegraph operator to master of the river, Florentino leads the way, a little old man with the temerity to embark on the treacherous Magdalena, fountainhead of myth, the river that will lead him and his beloved Fermina to her own heart of darkness, not to El Dorado but to La Dorada, back and forth between the shores of love and death, under the canopy of the yellow plague flag.
The love of letters, the letters of love
Florentino, the bastard son of a woman who owns a little shop, is sent to deliver a telegram to a house where a girl at a window stares back at him--a casual glance that triggers "a cataclysm of love" that will last the rest of his life. When Florentino returns home,
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