Love in the Time of Cholera

Only then did she realize that she had slept a long time without dying, sobbing in her sleep, and that while she slept, sobbing, she had thought more about Florentino Ariza than about her dead husband

or his eagerness to ask for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love. But no other man was as elusive either, so that their love never went beyond the point it always reached for him: the point where it would not interfere with his determination to remain free for Fermina Daza.

“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.”

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.

a clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which they often knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a cond ition to be despised. On the contrary: life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary.

the bathtub was another piece of abominable junk invented by Europeans who bathed only on the last Friday of the month, and the n in the same water made filthy by the very dirt they tried to remove from their bodies.

“Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.”

With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.”

Still, they continued to be intermittent lovers for almost thirty years, thanks to their musketeers’ motto: Unfaithful but not disloyal.

They shot each other over disagreements in the playground, they threatened the teachers if they received low grades on examinations