In the final stages of El amor en los tiempos del cólera Florentino Ariza nears the consummation of the love he maintained his entire life for Fermina Daza. The first time they are near intimacy he realizes that his stomach cannot handle the emotion, and he manages to drop her off before he soils himself in his carriage. The second time they are in the cabin of one of the ships owned by his company on a river cruise. They board this cruise in order leave behind the prying eyes of the people around them, in particular the judgments of her family who cannot understand, let alone approve, of the romance between the two elderly lovers. Finally in bed together, a lifetime of frustrated desire and affection seems to be about fulfilled, but Florentino Ariza, a man who waited patiently for his love finally to be free by bedding countless women, is unable to get an erection. But after waiting and waiting, they finally have sex. They are old. There is no illusion that the sex is more than two old people expressing a deep and hard-earned affection. There is no mention of passion and fireworks. The illusion of this novel lies elsewhere.
When I read this novel the first time long ago as a young man, I was caught up in the romance of it. Florentino Ariza pines for Fermina Daza his whole life, even as she finds love, family, and a happy and fulfilling marriage with someone else. Florentino Ariza accepts that life will not give him what he wants. He is poor and full of poetic illusions. He knows he must change. He spends the rest of his years making a life that will make it possible for Fermina Daza to want him when her handsome, rich, and attentive husband dies. And so it goes. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the husband, dies and Florentino Ariza arrives at the funeral to take care of the arrangements and to tell Fermina Daza that he is still in love with her. And with time she comes to love him. Who wouldn’t want that: to love, to suffer, and finally to find happiness?
The illusion that the novel lets you have, if you want it, is the romance, long-lasting and impervious to time and circumstance. But the novel also shows us that alongside that romance is the social situation. Fermina Daza doesn’t know why she first rejects Florentino Ariza. She knows that his poetic sensibilities cloud his understanding of reality. But it’s more than that. She also can’t really explain why she chooses Dr. Juvenal Urbino but she seems to intuit that it’s because of his beauty, his taste, his status, his money. She is a tropical Elizabeth Bennet seeing Pemberly for the first time and realizing that what society wants for her might be exactly what she wants for herself. Had Florentino Ariza not become rich and important, it is not altogether clear if she would have come around to loving him. That is why at the end of the novel they must remain on the ship. They cannot land because only on the ship can the demands, judgements, and prejudices of society be forestalled.
But who wants to think of that when all you want is love and desire? Who wants to be reminded of the crude demands of life when all you want is to touch someone and feel your breathing go shallow with terror and expectation? Olivia Rodrigo references this when she sings about being “all pressed up in the bathroom line.” Sometimes there is a breeze and in it you feel all the loneliness of the world, and you have to keep walking as if nothing happened. And sometimes you touch someone and you feel connection, desire, fantasy, and you also have to keep moving as if nothing happened. But either way nonetheless something happened.
