The Ecstasy of Agony in 'Love in the Time of Cholera' A. Livezey

An imminent era of lovesickness persuades the course of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza's love affair; it is this pending ailment - as Gabriel Garcia Marquez' title Love in the Time of Cholera suggests - that fuels the lovers' final movement away from "the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion," (345) and "straight to the heart of love" (345). Although the love between Fermina and Florentino is born out of a certain "senseless" and youthful passion, it is a passion nonetheless perpetuated by the suffering of each; while Florentino wallows in "a pool of fragrant vomit" (65) for his love, Fermina is "dying of fatigue and loose bowels" (85). In light of the torment that this love's survival demands, years roll by in the favor of an affair that will one day be consummated, but only at a moment in time that is undeniably terminal, at an age where physical corrosion harmonizes with emotional strife, and when their self-inflicted passions become, finally, a compassion that cannot logically be disentangled from the slow dying that infiltrates each of their lives. Time, in the novel, passes as mercilessly as the two aging lovers are stubborn, for only...