“He was awakened by sadness. Not the sadness he had felt that morning when he stood before the corpse of his friend, but the invisible cloud that would saturate his soul after his siesta and which he interpreted as divine notification that he was living his final afternoons.”
“Until then Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family had conceived of death as a misfortune that befell others, other people’s fathers and mothers, other people’s brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs. They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mist from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.”
The Nobel Prize winning writer Gabriel García Márquez saw cholera as a metaphor in his 1985 classic novel Love in the Time of Cholera. Marquez depicted cholera as an affliction, much like love — psychological, moral and political, an affliction that affected virtually everyone it touched, regardless of class or social standing. The ill-fated character of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, an idealistic physician devoted to science and dedicated to the eradication of the literal disease cholera, trusts in modernity, order and following life’s laws, even as he’s revealed later to be unfaithful to his young wife. He dies one day in old age, suffering a bad fall after reaching into a mango tree to retrieve his pet parrot.
And now we have el amor en los tiempos del Covid, when more and more people are reduced to reading books — imagine! — while in imposed self-isolation and social distancing.
On Facebook and in other social media forums, asked to name a book worth reading in these troubled times, it’s remarkable how often Love in the Time of Cholera comes up. A character in the Marquez novel equates love with a metaphorical plague; the term cholera translates in Spanish as cólera, a concept that also denotes passion, anger and repressed ire.
Books are subjective. No two people
are likely to read a book the same way; it’s not in their nature.
There are certain passages, though, passages that transcend the novel’s sense of time and place, that speak universal truths in the age of COVID-19.
“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice me manage to endure the burden of the past.”
Marquez died in Mexico City in 2014 at age 87, on April 17, six years ago virtually to the day. His health had been in decline since he was first diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999; though he recovered thanks to aggressive chemotherapy, he was found to be suffering from dementia in 2012.
His writing in Love in the Time of Cholera speaks to these times in myriad ways.
“Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”
It was almost as though he were leaving behind a letter to be opened at a later date, after his death, when he wrote, “Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life.”
One gets the feeling that had Marquez been forced to self-isolate in the time of COVID-19, he would have done just fine.
©Nile-Nicole-Pixabay
©Rottonara-Pixabay