A Writer’s Life Readings Week 9: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Hello Everyone. And welcome back.
It’s been a few weeks since the last time, when we met Mlle Matsumoto and Morhange, two pianists of differing sensibilities, through their art. This week, I’m thinking of letters, of how much a part of our lives they once were: we looked forward to writing them, receiving them, and to the excitement of reading them—often the best part of one’s day. A letter to a friend was a mark of your affection for them. Receiving a letter meant that you were loved. All across the globe, people treasured their connections to loved ones through letters that were either entrusted to emissaries or the mail—trains, planes, ships, elephants, camels, even pigeons carried them to their destinations. A letter, from composition to delivery, had a rich life of its own, which is why we sniffed them, and ran our hands across the sheets, and slept with them under our pillows. During this time of isolation in Manhattan, I’ve longed for that experience, unreasonably hoped that my mailbox would turn up a letter from a friend, and wished that, in a major reset, we would all revert to the days of letter-writing again.
When Gabriel García Márquez was asked which one of his articles he was most fond of, he said, “There was one little one called ‘'The Cemetery of Lost Letters,’ from the time I was working at El Espectador. I was sitting on a tram in Bogota. And I saw a sign that said: HOUSE OF LOST LETTERS. I rang the bell. They told me that all the letters that could not be delivered—with wrong addresses, whatever—were sent to that house. There was an old man in it who had dedicated his life entirely to finding their destination. Sometimes it took him days. If it couldn't be found, the letter was burned but never opened. There was one addressed ‘To the woman who goes to the Church de Las Armas every Wednesday at 5 P.M.’ So the old man went there and found seven women and questioned each of them. When he had picked the right one, he needed a court order to open the letter to be sure. And he was right. I'll never forget that story.”
In Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, two people fall in love through the letters they write each other. A spinster aunt, mourning the loss of her own dreams, becomes the go-between at first, but soon the lovers begin a direct exchange.
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“It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them. Never in that delirious spring, or in the following year, did they have the opportunity to speak to each other. Moreover, from the moment they saw each other for the first time until he reiterated his determination a half century later, they never had the opportunity to be alone or to talk of their love. But during the first three months not one day went by that they did not write to each other, and for a time they wrote twice a day, until Aunt Escolástica became frightened by the intensity of the blaze that she herself had helped to ignite. …
“The method was simple: Fermina Daza would leave her letter in some hiding place along her daily route from the house to the Academy, and in that letter she would indicate to Florentino Ariza where she expected to find his answer. Florentino Ariza did the same. In this way, for the rest of the year, the conflicts in Aunt Escolástica’s conscience were transferred to baptisteries in churches, holes in trees, and crannies in ruined colonial fortresses. Sometimes their letters were soaked by rain, soiled by mud, torn by adversity, and some were lost for a variety of other reasons, but they always found a way to be in touch with each other again.
“Florentina Ariza wrote every night. Letter by letter, he had no mercy as he poisoned himself with the smoke from the palm oil lamps in the back room of the notions shop, and his letters became more discursive and more lunatic the more he tried to imitate his favorite poets from the Popular Library, which even at that time was approaching eighty volumes. His mother, who had urged him with so much fervor to enjoy his torment, became concerned for his health. ‘You are going to wear out your brains,’ she shouted at him from the bedroom when she heard the first roosters crow. ‘No woman is worth all that.’ She could not remember ever having known anyone in such a state of unbridled passion. But he paid no attention to her. Sometimes he went to the office without having slept, his hair in an uproar of love after leaving the letter in the prearranged hiding place so that Fermina Daza would find it on her way to school. She, on the other hand, under the watchful eye of her father and the vicious spying of the nuns, could barely manage to fill half a page from her notebook when she locked herself in the bathroom or pretended to take notes in class. But this was not only due to her limited time and the danger of being taken by surprise, it was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls, and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship’s log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line. …
“Their frenetic correspondence was almost two years old when Florentino Ariza, in a letter of only one paragraph, made a formal proposal of marriage to Fermina Daza. On several occasions during the preceding six months he had sent her a white camellia but she would return it to him in her next letter so that he would have no doubt that she was disposed to continue writing to him, but without the seriousness of an engagement. The truth is that she had always taken the comings and goings of the camellia as a lovers’ game, and it had never occurred to her to consider it as a crossroads in her destiny. But when the formal proposal arrived she felt herself wounded for the first time by the clawings of death. Panic-stricken, she told her Aunt Escolástica, who gave her advice with the courage and lucidity she had not had when she was twenty and was forced to decide her own fate.
‘Tell him yes,’ she said. ‘Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.’
“Fermina Daza, however, was so confused that she asked for some time to think it over. First she asked for a month, then two, then three, and when the fourth month had ended and she had still not replied, she received a white camellia again, not alone in the envelope as on other occasions but with the peremptory notification that this was the last one: it was now or never. Then that same afternoon it was Florentino Ariza who saw the face of death when he received an envelope containing a strip of paper, torn from the margin of a school notebook, on which a one-line answer was written in pencil. Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.”
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Thanks very much for listening. Until next time.
These passages are from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, and published in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc