Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Section 1

Section 2

Section 3

Section 4

Section 5

Section 6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Section 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 221-250 Summary

Fermina Daza is often visible to Florentino Ariza, and Florentino often watches her; he recalls seeing her climb into the basket of the first hot air balloon launch in the city, and he passes his own life noticing the imperceptible shifts in her behavior and temperament. One year, he is unable to find her; he drives by her house and he waits outside the church, but Fermina Daza appears to have disappeared. He hears that she is dying of consumption at a hospital in Panama, but in fact, she has gone to stay with her cousin Hildebranda because Urbino has had an affair with a woman he met at the hospital.

Fermina Daza discovers the affair when smelling her husband’s clothes, and she finally confronts him after months of pain. He is madly in love with a woman named Barbara Lynch, who is a Doctor of Theology and the daughter of a Protestant minister. Urbino has the affair because he is looking for someone who understands him; in his old age, “all the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearance in his body” (242) and he struggles to understand himself. When Fermina Daza confronts her husband, he admits his wrongdoing. Urbino is relieved, but Fermina Daza is ashamed and angry. She flees to her hometown, and she finds it so dramatically different from her memories that she refuses to look at some villages, for fear they will change forever in her mind.

Pages 251-273 Summary

After nearly two years at a ranch, Fermina Daza returns to the city with her husband, who appears one day to take her home. She is relieved but changed forever. Soon after her return, Florentino Ariza recognizes her voice, overhearing her speak at the movies; when he turns to look at her after the film, she appears to him to have aged ten years. Florentino Ariza struggles little as he ages because he feels he has been an old man since he was a child, but he does fear that “death, the son of a bitch, would win an irreparable victory in his fierce war of love” (274).

Florentino Ariza is losing his hair, but he is otherwise safe from the pains of old age, unlike Urbino and Fermina Daza who were once young and splendid. He recalls many lovers who appreciated his naked body because without clothes, his body appears much younger than when clothed. At the time of Urbino’s death, Florentino only has one lover left—a fourteen-year-old girl named América Vicuña who was put in his charge while she attends boarding school in the city. She resembles a young Fermina Daza, and Florentino loves her deeply. They are sleeping together on a quiet Sunday afternoon when Florentino hears the bells ring announcing Urbino’s death. He hurries to his friend Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s funeral, only to hear from his coach driver that Urbino is dead. He drops América off at boarding school early and departs for Fermina Daza’s house, where he announces his love for her at the end of the night. After three miserable weeks, waiting for her letter and convincing himself he wasted fifty years of vigilance, he finds a letter written in her hand sitting in a puddle on his doorstep.

Section 5 Analysis

The theme of the interconnectedness of love and suffering illuminates the disillusion Fermina Daza experiences when she realizes that her husband has been unfaithful. She learns of Urbino’s infidelity when she smells another woman on his clothes, but ironically, Fermina Daza is not the only one who suffers from this love—Urbino does too. His pain at deceiving his wife and living with the secret plagues him, so much so that he doesn’t even experience joy with the object of his illicit love, Barbara Lynch. The omniscient narrator describes the pain of Urbino’s infidelity as a loss of control for both parties; Fermina feels as if her husband is slipping away from her and from their marriage, while Urbino is unable recognize himself in the moral degeneracy of his actions. This loss of control is symbolized in part by Urbino’s choice to stop going to confession: his inability to access his own spirituality speaks to his moral pain and confusion.

Florentino’s growing awareness of death enables him to feel a tenderness towards his old rival, Urbino. The two men share similar personality characteristics, ones that drew in Fermina, like supreme confidence, single-mindedness, and determination, and now, they share a sense of suffering as a result of their interaction with Fermina Daza. Neither man, despite his efforts with other women, is able to free himself of Fermina.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

8,800+ In-Depth Study Guides
4,700+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
Downloadable PDFs

At the same time, Florentino realizes that he no longer needs to feel that Urbino is his enemy, for the love of Fermina; in fact, no man is Florentino’s enemy where love is concerned because he is in a war with time. Florentino’s perception of time as an adversary is consistent with his grandiose character; for example, he observes the appearance of an aging lover and realizes: “death, the son of a bitch, would win an irreparable victory in his fierce war of love” (274). Whether or not Florentino will be able to consummate his love with Fermina before his death or hers, he knows that looming death will be the end his love affair. A human hand is unlikely to cause Florentino pain when it comes to matters of the heart; Florentino’s heart will truly break only at the hands of death.