Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Marquez | Summary & Quotes

• Fermina's marriage to Urbino, meanwhile, is intensely if quietly unhappy. Fermina feels remorse over losing Florentino and guilt over all her decisions since. Urbino may provide financial comfort and security, but his mother micromanages his wife's every activity. In the midst of this misery, she learns of her father Lorenzo's criminal smuggling activities, followed by his enforced exile. Surprisingly, even her father is furious over her mother-in-law's breaking of Fermina's spirit. Fermina's inheritance of her childhood household, at her father's behest, does nothing to help her regain any sense of autonomy. Once, she randomly encounters her lost love, and they can barely acknowledge one another, like hollowed-out shells of their former selves.

• By the turn of the twentieth century, the Urbino family had been living elsewhere for some years, their native region ravaged again by cholera. But they return near the opening of Chapter 5, and Florentino keeps her house under his almost daily watch, hoping to re-encounter her, but instead, she seems to have mysteriously disappeared from society. In fact, she's gone to live with her cousin Hildebranda, now secretly estranged from Urbino upon discovering his intensely guilt-ridden affair with the young wife of a respected Presbyterian minister.

• And Florentino's own love life has, meanwhile, resulted in the death of his latest lover, Olimpia, at the hands of her jealous husband. Believing that he may die from his dissolute lifestyle before he can declare his true love once more, he never thinks that Fermina might pass on before him. Instead, he continues to philosophize and poeticize on all his tortured feelings and the sublimity and ecstasy of passion. Again, the contrast with Fermina's life during this time is stark; she soon returns home to her husband, feeling greater love for him though also wanting him to pay for hurting her. These conflicted emotions play out through strained domesticity.

• One day, Florentino goes to a movie with his longtime friend, Leona, whom he had long ago rescued from destitution. Running into the Urbinos, Florentino is stunned by Fermina's elderliness and believes his feelings for her are now null and void. Instead of examining his stupidity, which Márquez tacitly wants us to understand is something he's never been able to do, he decides to seduce Leona, willing to risk his one real friendship. Luckily for him, she rejects him nicely, and only Leona's rejection allows Florentino to believe that he, too, is elderly, and no longer an attractive player. Finally, he realizes that time is running out for both himself and his great love. Still, he continues to believe in free love and visits prostitutes who somehow become so taken with him that they demand no payment. Meanwhile, Urbino remains wracked with guilt over his brief affair, sick with the love he never learned to properly share with his wife, right up until the moment of his death.

• Ironically, Florentino's healthiest loving relationship is with Leona, whom he'll never have sex with. She understands him too well, much better than he does himself. Meanwhile, Florentino believes that, truly, he is still a virgin, because he has never consummated his one true love with Fermina.

• During the first part of the final chapter, we revisit Florentino's dramatic return to Fermina's life, followed, however, by their yearlong epistolary relationship, during which they come to wax nostalgic on old feelings and shared experiences of lost youth. Florentino never mentions his affairs or sex addiction. Instead, he looks forward to giving joy and the ecstasy of romance to Fermina during this closing act of her long, sad life. Finding his opportunity with her at last, he does abandon a fourteen-year-old lover (and distant cousin), América Vicuña, who commits suicide upon realizing that her beloved Florentino has only have felt passion for another, an ancient woman. Conveniently, Florentino blots the news of her demise from his mind; however, he does eventually weep for her, quietly.

• Toward the end, the pair finally get to consummate their love away from a disapproving public, though, hilariously, Fermina does not believe for a minute that Florentino is a virgin. However, their literal consummation is an embarrassment, Florentino's last pitiful attempt at sex. At last, he is impotent. Still, at the purely emotional level, their loving communion is all either has ever wanted, they both realize. This all occurs aboard one of his Riverboat Company's pleasure cruises.

• To avoid the public censure for Fermina's sake, Florentino has the captain raise the yellow flag signaling a cholera quarantine, allowing the happy elderly couple to enjoy their romance in solitude, likely until the end of their quickly declining natural lives, sailing up and down the riverways ''forever.''

• The yellow flag hoisted over Florentino and Fermina's ship was indeed an actual signal of cholera during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It signaled that the crew was under quarantine, which was typically enforced for 30 to 40 days. (None of the novel's characters are cholera victims; the disease is present purely as metaphor and a vague but real-world threat in the background.)

• Thus, in the novel, the flag may represent those who have given themselves over completely to lovesickness/sickness in passion.

• Letters and epistolary exchanges represent another aspect of passion. They act as vehicles for emotions that are otherwise repressed, buried by the various taboos of society or family or even self-discipline (as with Doctor Urbino, who committed himself to scientific progress at the expense of his personal life). The activity of letter-writing is a window into each of the characters, and whether they are sent or not, unsealed or not, and read or not speak to the characters' emotions during those moments--as does the language used and even the clarity of the handwriting (e.g., Urbino's writing deteriorates with his health).

• The various romances told through the narrative and the surrounding letter-writing are in defiance of contemporary social taboos, especially regarding society's strictures that the elderly should not yearn and feel passion, much less sexual desire. Fermina and Urbino's children, in particular, represent this prejudice, to her detriment.

• ''At the height of pleasure he had experienced a revelation that he could not believe that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion.'' - This is from Chapter 3, when Florentino loses his virginity to the mysterious and intense Rosalba aboard a riverboat. The overwhelming physical pleasure he experiences temporarily ameliorates the pangs of his unrequited love for Fermina. It is here that he discovers sex as a relief, albeit all too temporary, from deep emotional trauma. He becomes a sex addict.

• ''By two o'clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies, and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was looking for, and he was glad to know it. 'Bravo, lionlady,' he said when he left. 'We have killed the tiger.' - In Chapter 5, Florentino realizes the sexual tension he had experienced for many years with Leona Cassiani, initially his uncle's PA at the Riverboat Company, a job that Florentino landed her, having been intensely attracted to her and rescuing her from poverty. But ultimately, she calls him out on his delusion here, telling him he's not the one for her. Even so, she retains a maternal love for this wayward man, an interesting reversal since he had originally been her savior from destitution.

When they at last consummate their romance, the happy couple are on a river cruise, courtesy of Florentino's riverboat business. Returning to their home port, Fermina is anxious that gossips will spark a scandal, so Florentino orders the captain raise the yellow flag of cholera quarantine and sail back and forth on the river potentially 'forever' in exile from a society that will never understand.