Word: fermina
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Dates: during 1988-1988
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...calamity sets church bells tolling and mourners swarming to the Urbino household, for the deceased physician had been one of the most honored and distinguished residents of the city. Among the visitors is Florentino Ariza, 76, president of the River Co. of the Caribbean, who approaches the bereaved widow, Fermina Daza, 72, and says, " I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love." Fermina furiously shows him the door...
This contretemps calls for a bit of explaining, and Garcia Marquez flashes backward to tell all. A half-century of solitude earlier, Florentino enjoys a passionate, three-year romance with the schoolgirl Fermina, conducted entirely through the exchange of clandestine letters. His swooning preoccupation and physical distress arouse concern: "His mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera." But it is love, all right, and Florentino's symptoms grow worse when Fermina abruptly tosses him aside and later weds Dr. Urbino, the scion of an illustrious though fading...
Melodrama would be served if Fermina repented immediately and suffered married life at leisure. In fact, her husband is a good man, and she hardly has a thought to spare for Florentino and his blighted life. For his part, Florentino resolves to keep himself spiritually pure for the moment when he will, someday, possess Fermina; in the meantime, he consoles himself with the physical companionship of women in order to learn more about his beloved. He writes down his impressions and amasses "some 25 notebooks, with 622 entries of long-term liaisons, apart from the countless fleeting adventures that...
Will Florentino and Fermina find happiness at the long, bitter end? Garcia Marquez answers this question eventually, but the success of his novel does not depend on the outcome. The genius of Love in the Time of Cholera is the filling-in of the gaps of ordinary life, the munificence of detail that can be exacted from a place where, as Dr. Urbino muses, "nothing had happened for four centuries." Nonetheless, the torpid scenery provides a beguiling background, "the broken roofs and the decaying walls, the rubble of fortresses among the brambles, the trail of islands...