At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.

The most recent section of Love in the Time of Cholera, the third section, is oddly reminiscent of the first section in the way that the leading men find Fermina and how Fermina reacts to the men.

Lorenzo Daza encounters Dr. Juvenal Urbino in much the same way as he encounters Florentina Ariza, but of course with a much different outcome. When Florentino delivers a telegram to Lorenzo, Lorenzo ignores Florentino and even makes the messenger wait. Lorenzo, grumpy and rude, shakes Florentino’s hand but does not offer a tip. Lorenzo warmly welcomes Dr. Urbino, offers a large tip, and invites him in for coffee and anisette. These two encounters reveal much about Lorenzo Daza. It is obvious that he is a controlling man, one who is able to whisk away his daughter so that she would forget her forbidden lover. However his biased receptions of these two men show that he also greedy. He does not care about how Fermina would receive these men or whether they can offer her the love and support she deserves (although his pick of men eventually is the man Fermina marries). Instead, he looks for a wealthy man with property, class, status, and power. Lorenzo is greedy but is he trying to find the best man for Fermina or for himself?

From reading only the first section of the novel, I could tell this book would be one filled with opposites; novels about love seem to always feature those almost eerily convenient and ironic opposites, such as in Pride and Prejudice when Austen juxtaposes good and bad marriages. Lorenzo adamantly forbids Fermina’s love affair with Florentino, even though Fermina and Florentino desire each other. Now that Lorenzo wants Fermina to pursue a man, Urbino, she refuses and tries to avoid the Doctor; she even shuts a window Doctor Urbino’s face. It is also interesting to point out that Fermina is sent on a trip to forget about her lover and then Hildebranda also is sent away by her parents on a journey to forget her lover. I doubt that the journeys accomplish the purpose of the trip or anything else. Since Fermina’s exile did not make her forget about Florentino and actually only intensified her feelings, I foresee that Hildebranda will return home with the same feelings of unrequited love.

Although I could probably continue on with this discussion, I would like to touch on Marquez’s representation of love as a disease, comparable to cholera. Florentino seems to be infected by a deadly virus, which turns out to be a passion for Fermina Daza. His symptoms, his disillusionment, his sentimentalism, and his delirium, are a direct effect of his lovesickness. At one point in the novel, Florentino becomes so ill worrying about when Fermina will return his declaration of love and why she has not responded earlier, that a homeopathic practitioner called in mistakenly diagnoses Florentino with cholera. He vomits, faints, and becomes disoriented, all symptoms of cholera. He seemed to be a dying man until Transito, the doctor, and the reader realizes the “symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.” The impact of unrequited love is emphasized when Florentino, finally having received a letter from Fermina, returns to a strength and confidence that he “had never known before” and because of this new attitude he lands a better job and has time to hang out and have a beer with the sailors (61, 74).

Lovesickness, not cholera, is the true plague of this story. (585)