. Spinning .

I’ve upset Mark in my finale review of this novel, and realize that I didn’t truly give adequate time to the novel in my post.

Perhaps I should have made it clearer; sex was not the be-all, end-all of their relationship.  In fact, it’s not all that important to them, even to Florentino, who has dreamed of this all his life. 

What Marquez relates is that the withered body parts are not a turn-off, but accepted as fact.  Fermina and Florentino have become accustomed to the changes brought in aging.  Marquez has prepared them–and us–for the obvious by granting little expositions of their physical and mental maturity.  Florentino is shaken by the sight of seeing Fermina trip on a stair in the church.  He realizes as well that he may die before her, that his whole life plan can easily be thwarted by death. 

Their joy in each other is surprisingly found in their conversations, their sitting silently hand in hand. This is the way they take off into the sunset, on a riverboat they see as their freedom from demands, yet knowing full well they will return home and marry.  The future, what is left to them, is willingly looked forward to in spending such days together.  This is what their hearts yearned for, though they didn’t realize it enough to seek it from past relationships.

Many passages in the novel reflect their ties to their environment, even while they can see it for what it is, decaying and ravaged by weather and war and man’s abuses of the land, they choose to see it better than it is–just as Florentino sees Fermina through the years. 

Why I believe that Marquez has brought these characters to a higher level is that had they married in their youth, Florentino’s determined efforts to win her and his ultimate personal success in business and life would not have been his way of life had he been with her.  Fermina would not have matured into the full and loving woman she’s become.  They would not have been happy together for those fifty years, I don’t think, but with what they’ve learned from life in that time, they will be.

"If we’re going to do it, let’s do it," she said, "but let’s do it like grownups."

At long last, Fermina and Florentino are about to make love.  She, realizing that this love is not the same as what she held for her husband, and even then, she did not realize that that was love that they shared for fifty years of marriage.  Florentino, his dreams of Fermina and his lifelong vow to be with her, is not what he had imagined, and yet it suits him well.

He lies, tells her he has kept himself a virgin for her.  She doesn’t believe him but understands what he means.  He realizes too, that he may be lying to himself, in that his love for the child America Vicuna was real.

But Florentino Ariza’s prudence had an unexpected reward:  she stretched out her hand in the darkness, caressed his belly, his flanks,his almost hairless pubis.  She said:  "You have skin like a baby’s."  Then she took the final step:  she searched for him where he was not, she searched again wiwthout hope, and she found him, unarmed.  (p. 340)

There is a freedom they find in each other now, one that would not have been possible together when they were young.  Not with each other, nor with anyone else.  This freedom is of self and it is of honesty, without pride and the baggage that youth brings to love. 

I’d say they came together at the exactly right time in their lives.  Marquez has kept them apart for half a century to attend to the demands of life.  Now together, they can truly enjoy it without reservation, without expectations or fear.

I’m sensing within Marquez’s narratives a continuity of low-level conflict that is a constant beneath the layers of ongoing story.  Perhaps because this novel, as well as 100 Years of Solitude is based upon his own country of birth, there is a war of some sort going on within the background that changes throughout the distance of time yet changes very little the space in which it occurs. 

The love affairs, the wedded loves that drive the stories are driven, it would appear, by this background tension and are affected in much the same way.  Nothing appears to be gained–or lost–in the proceedings.  In Solitude, the steady stream of Aurelianos who seemingly were carbon copies of their ancestors, learning very little in evolution and revolution of change.  In Cholera, the endless loop is near to ending where it began in the proposed love between Florentino and Fermina. 

The battles in between, the married time, the wandering through the scores of merely scoring–and to be fair, searching, I suppose–change the main characters’ lives as much as their countryside, which is to say, not much.  Borders may wander back and forth, and houses are destroyed and rebuilt, and the squalor is always seen through the jaded eyes as home.

Peace, perhaps, or sense of place, is likely what Marquez’s characters are truly seeking.

I am realizing that Marquez’s love story is not about sex, and not really about love.  It is about relationships but, I think, in the individual sense of what a character is seeking and how he/she goes about it and what it represents to them rather than concentrating on the interaction.  I believe that in Fermina’s marriage, just as in Florentino’s sacred vow to himself to have her and his relationships with women in the meantime, each is attempting to find their purpose in life.  To fulfill and be fulfilled.

The young Fermina wants attention and excitement and gets it from the youthful Florentino, who is seeking some stability and validation in an idol of adoration.  Fermino carries the passions within her for Florentino for three years until it has the possibility of becoming real–when she is old enough to accept a suitor.  Then of course, one look at Florentino convinces her that he certainly is not suitable.

While Marquez brings us through Florentino’s undying love for Fermina that lasts fifty years despite her marriage to someone else, we still feel for him.  We forgive him his lustful dalliances, all 6oo-plus of them, but likely would not forgive him had he himself gotten married.  And just to make sure we’re not losing the point, Marquez gives us a more defined portrait of Florentino as he ages, his odd black, out-of style suit, his pale and sickly complexion, his losing battle against baldness, his false teeth; although he was never attractive even in his prime. 

But Marquez needs us to forgive Fermina for spurning him, and thus the reminder:  Florentino was certainly no prize and likely a shock to her senses after what she’d built up in her mind when she was sent away as a girl to forget him.

So now, after her husband’s death, another seemingly loveless but secure path of marriage, Fermina and Florentino are again having a relationship of letters–perhaps feeling each other out as to what they each can offer, what each is seeking in old age.

I’m having a less than ideal experience with Marquez in this novel in that I am not having those moments of awe and elation that I recall from 100 Years of Solitude.  Just when I am writing it off to it merely being a lesser novel, Steve persists in seeing more in a passage than I can conceive, even in my determined effort to find it.

I want to be surprised, I want that element of layers in reading that grants the pleasure of discovery.  It may be more necessary for me to explore instead the frame of mind of the reader rather than the writer right now, and how it affects reading and story.  Maybe, as much control over story as Barthes hopes to lay in the hands (mind) of the reader, bears a burden not only of desire and experience, but one of mood, or openness and focus as well. 

In other words, is it possible for the reader to experience a particular story in many different ways dependent upon time and circumstance?  Certainly this would be true in poetry. Is this what broadens the possibility of paths that the more elaborate interactivity of new media methods allows by conscious choice rather than mental state alone?

Obviously, what Florentino Ariza discovers about women through his liaisons with prostitutes is never applied to ladies such as his beloved Fermina Daza, but this observation is interesting:

It was in those days that he devised his rather simplistic theories concerning the relationship between a woman’s appearance and her aptitude for love.  He distrusted the sensual type, the ones who looked as if they could eat an alligator raw and tended to be the most passive in bed.  The type he preferred was just the opposite:  those skinny little tadpoles that no one bothered to turn around and look at in the street, who seemed to disappear when they took of their clothes, who made you feel sorry for them when their bones cracked at the first impact, and yet who could leave the man who bragged the most about virility ready for the trashcan.  (p. 175)

Marquez portrays his characters as very sexual beings, in both this novel and in 100 Years of Solitude, the men in particular do quite a bit of wandering about, and their women are of different stations, a line drawn between respectably married and paid whore, with a middle ground of sorts where the married ladies may dally and the mistresses gain a certain amount of respectability.

It is an old fashioned standard that is certainly within its time period, and while not the norm by today’s looser beliefs, I cannot help but feel that in the mind of man, some beliefs die hard.  Action is not always telling of prejudice.

Marquez slips in some food for thought:

His (Florentino Ariza’s) uncle was angry with him because of the manner in which he had thrown away the good position of telegraph operator in Villa de Leyva, but he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.  (p. 165)

Now there are several ways perhaps to take this.  In one line of thought, we see man’s potential to change according to life experience and free will.  This is likely Marquez’s meaning.  But then I recall in his 100 Years of Solitude various references along the theory of eternal life of the soul, reincarnation occuring as a repeated span of physical life in which also, the purpose is to learn and grow, or change.

I do wonder to which, if either, he hints.

Marquez touches upon a sensitive topic here with Florentino Ariza, who has just discovered that Fermina Daza has decided upon wedding the persistent Dr. Juvenal Urbino.  Urbino may not have had the dedication to the affair from Fermina, but he is desirable by her family and so there is no need for the careful hiding of love (as was the case with Florentino), which also served as the force and intrigue to Fermina.  But she is won nevertheless.  Ariza is brokenhearted and accepts an arranged position far away to forget his passion.  Aboard the ship that takes him on his journey:

One night when he stopped his reading earlier than usual and was walking, distracted, towards the toilets, a door opened as he passed through the dining room, and a hand like the talon of a hawk seized him by the shirt sleeve and pulled him into a cabin.  In the darkness he could barely see the naked woman, her ageless body soaked in hot perspiration, her breathing heavy, who pushed him onto the bunk face up, unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his trousers, impaled herself on him as if she were riding horseback, and stripped him, without glory, of his virginity.  Both of them fell, in an agony of desire, into the void of a bottomless pit that smelled of a salt marsh full of prawns.  Then she lay for a moment on top of him, gasping for breath, and she ceased to exist in the darkness.  (p. 141)

Male rape.  Big question since there must be some compliance on his part–though physical and likely beyond the control of his mind.  But he made no attempt to stop her, and indeed, was taken by surprise. 

Why does Marquez put an end to Ariza’s agony of passion for Fermina in this way?  The natural culmination of his desire for Fermina would have been this physical act of love, and yet it is almost as if Fate has declared, "all right, already; this is what it’s about."  Florentino is just as quickly sent out of the room, but he attempts for the next several days to discover his attacker.  Intrigued by the incident, enlightened perhaps, and anxious.  Marquez has shown us the power of the mind through the enduring love of Florentino for Fermina over many years.  Is there a hint here of the basic instincts that are stronger than the mind to drive the natural act of mankind?

Ah, Marquez does not disappoint:  Soon after she has spurned her long-time love, Fermina Daza comes into contact with Dr. Juvenal Urbino whom she will eventually wed.  But the games must be played.  They meet on a professional call he makes to her home when she is taken ill.  He becomes infatuated with her as did that loser, Florentino Ariza, but things do not go well.  She will not see him, and he sends her letters and small gifts that are unacknowledged by the proud Fermina who while curious, is angry.  Then this:

This conviction became even more bitter after the fear caused by the black doll that was sent to her without any letter, but whose origin seemed easy enough to imagine:  only Dr. Juvenal Urbino could have sent it.  It had been bought in Martinique, according to the original tag, and it was dressed in an exquisite gown, its hair rippled with gold threads and it closed its eyes when it was laid down.  It seemed so charming to Fermina Daza that she overcame her scruples and laid it on her pillow during the day and grew accustomed to sleeping with it at night.  After a time, however, she discovered when she awoke from an exhusting dream that the doll was growing:  the original exquisite dress she had arrived in was up above her thighs, and her shoes had burst from the pressure of her feet.  Fermina Daza had heard of African spells, but none as frightening as this.  (p. 125)

It turns out that Dr. Urbino had not sent the doll, but what does this mean?  I love the way that Marquez sneaks something like this into what heretofore had been pretty straight story.  And, I know it will come up again somewhere in the story and its symbolism will be made clear.  It is the rising up to the heavens of Remedios the Beauty while folding sheets.

Why is it that Marquez can string me along so fluidly on a well formed cloud that threatens yet entices, and leave me in a hoot of laughter, my brows still furrowed in the drama of the moments leading up, unable to relax themselves in time they are caught in such surprise.

Fermina Daza has been taken away by her father on a two-year "donkey ride" as Mark called it to forget about the pining love of Florentino Ariza and their engagement.  He is unsuitable, and Marquez makes us wonder why her choice.  He alone believes himself able to make his fortune on sunken treasure, dressed up in the boat as always on land: 

Euclides almost naked, with only the loincloth that he always wore, and Florentino Ariza with his frock coat, his tenebrous hat, his patent-leather boots, the poet’s bow at his neck, and a book to pass the time during the crossing to the islands. (p.90)

We already have the feeling that Florentino would never be our choice, but we feel sorry for him.  Fermina, not a fool, but too young to fall in love with anything but love itself and the mysteries that it offers.  But they correspond secretly all the time she is away.  Upon her return, her father convinced that she has gotten over the foolishness, she has matured to a graceful and confident seventeen.  Named keeper of the house by her father who is well pleased by her level headed grace, Fermina goes out to the market, still intent on buying things she feels will serve her in her marriage to Florentino.  But Florentino, shocked by the sight of her, enthralled with her and more in love than ever, silently follows her through her shopping trip until he feels he must warn her of her surroundings and whispers it along with his code name for her, "crowned goddess."

Here’s the great part:

She turned her head and saw, a hand’s breadth from her eyes, those other glacial eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified with fear, just as she had seen them in the crowd at Midnight Mass the first time he was so close to  her, but now, instead of the commotion of love, she felt th abyss of disenchantment.  In an instant the magnitude of her own mistake was revealed to her, and she asked herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for so long and with so much ferocity.  She just managed to think:  My God, poor man!  Florentino smiled, tried to say something, tried to follow her, but she erased him from her life with a wave of her hand.  (p. 102)

There is  richness here in growth of character, although some might say that basing love on looks alone is rather proud.  But it is, I think, Marquez’s intent to show not mere folly of youth, but that youth has visions that differ with experience.  And as for Florentino, he saw her with a lover’s eyes, and he is older.  She has grown more beautiful, and he is seeing confirmation rather than disillusion. Plus, he’s an odd duck, and Fermina’s returned promises of love would have fueled his focus.

But it still made me laugh.

How odd, or maybe it is just that I’m still in editing mode, or perhaps Gabriel Garcia Marquez meant this for a purpose:

Florentino Ariza had often seen Lorenzo Daza gambling and drinking cask wines there with the Asturians from the public market, while they shouted and argued about other long-standing wars that had nothing to do with our own.  (p. 80)

I might have missed it in prior reading, but since the story is written in third person pov, this reference to "our own" struck me and stopped me cold.  Not a mistake, I’m sure; Marquez is too good for that and the translators would not have faltered on such.  I mean,it could be, but I doubt it. 

What then; Marquez’s intimate knowledge of what he writes about, especially in time and place, may have slipped in here.  It startles because it stops the flow; it is a place to ponder:  War.

Marquez, I’m realizing, is a natural for hypertext.  As in the entry below, the birds as a symbol and metaphor are causing me to continually go back in my reading to bring up a previous mention.  Just as the begonias in 100 Years, Marquez weaves the symbol within the tapestry of many colors and designs.  But by the third time it’s mentioned, it’s noted, and he does drop hints along the way, like breadcrumb links that need be followed to discover the nest.

Only in book format, it’s that much harder.  I’ve learned to scribble down a page number with a notation when I think I’m onto something–much easier than trying to scan eighty pages or more to find a reference. 

Marquez, though I can never be a single word of the writer he is, has affected me and yet I just realized it now; in the pseudohyperfiction group of four short stories I’d written and linked with bracketed page numbers by certain words, I knew that it wasnt’ exactly going off on a different trail or path as hyperfiction does, but the use of certain words that tied the stories together  sounds now to me to be a form of homage to Marquez.

I would love to see a piece of work from Gabriel Garcia Marquez presented as text/audio/visual new media.  The colors, the movement, the sound would confirm the life of his words.

As always, even as I read ahead my mind goes back to something read before; especially with Marquez.  After a long time of watching from afar, Florentino Ariza finally takes a stand and walks up to the object of his love, Fermina Daza.  As usual, she is seated in her yard under the almond trees, embroidering with Aunt Escolastica (Lord, I love that name!) and he takes advantage of a moment when Auntie E goes into the house.  He receives permission from Fermina to deliver to her a letter he has written, but he must wait for a sign (sigh, yes, the games begin).  At last, he is allowed to approach when once again she is left alone:

He took the letter out of his inside jacket pocket and held it before the eyes of the troubled embroiderer, who had still not dared to look at him.  She saw the blue envelope trembling in a hand petrified with terror, and she raised the embroidery frame so he could put the letter on it, for she could not admit that she had noticed the trembling of his fingers.  Then it happened:  A bird shook himself among the leaves of the almond trees, and his droppings fell right on the embroidery.  (p. 61)

I have a feeling, especially after the parrot business of the first chapter, that birds in this story are the begonias of 100 Years of Solitude.  Another reference to birds is what the ladies of the evening are called in the house where Florentino often stays.  But what will they represent?

Obviously, not the good sh.. of the blue bird of happiness, the droppings on the embroidery which marks the first reaching of Fermina towards Florentino has some significance.  When we introduce ourselves to each other, we offer a part of ourselves that is now open to the other.  The physical touching that the ruined embroidery now forces (she hides it behind her in embarrassment) allows a more intimate closeness.  But does the bit of bird doo on the piece signify what will come of the meeting?  Their future?

And what was she embroidering?  Wouldn’t you love to see that image?

Love, of course, is the underlying theme of this novel, but it occurred to me that it is also a symbol with deeper connotations.

The love Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza have in their marriage is one that is typical in long term relationships.  It includes an interdependency and yet a silent insistence on some small measure of self.  It is enduring amid a relative stability that withstands events that threaten to disrupt it.

Reading further into the book, we see the similarity of this particular relationship to the political environment of the country in which they live.  There are constant wars, large and small, going on somewhere close by; rebellions that erupt and fall–very much like a marriage. And it is out of total devotion and dedication–and a sense of lost independence–that this love evokes the passion to bring about the action.

But then we go into a different kind of love, that of Florentino Ariza for Fermina Daza when she was a young girl.  His relentless adoration finally convinces her to react with the same passion; yet this comes about when they have done no more than exchange a few verbal words but written hundreds of letters.  It is blind commitment, not knowing the other well, not willing to reveal self prior to the sealing of the fate.

I wonder, what is this akin to in the world of politics? 

Another thing I find in Marquez is an ability to put the human element into a very relative form amid the routine lives of his characters, so that we understand their behavior in more traumatic events.  I love this segment about Dr. Urbino and his wife, Fermina Daza in the early years of their marriage, which reveals a bit of gameplaying that endures in their relationship in condensed form in their early morning rising: he early, noisy; she later, pretending sleep.  But it displays one of those turning points in a marriage where control and compromise is established:

The truth was they both played a game, mythical and perverse, but for all that, comforting; it was one of the many dangerouse pleasures of domestic love.  But one of those trivial games almost ended the first thirty years of their life together, because one day there was no soap in the bathroom.  (p. 17)

Marquez has injected a bit of humor here, and yet truth, as the biggest annoyances are usually over the smallest but most persistent aggravations.  Dr. Urbino has risen and bathed in the dark of early morning, while Fermina is in her half-awake state in bed:

After a prolonged sound of starched linen in the darkness, Dr.  Urbino said to himself:  "I’ve been bathing for almost a week without any soap."

Then, fully awake, she remembered, and tossed and turned in fury with the world because in fact she had forgotten to replace the soap in the bathroom.  She had noticed its absence three days earlier when she was already under the shower, and had planned to replace it afterward, but then she forgot until the next day, and on the third day the same thing happened again.  The truth was that a week had not gone by, as he said to make her feel more guilty, but three unpardonable days, and her anger at being found out in a mistake maddened her.  As always, she defended herself by attacking.

"Well I’ve bathed every day," she shouted, beside herself with rage, "and there’s always been soap."

Sound familiar?  People, often fed up with other things that have accumulated over time, decide to take a stand and sadly, it’s often when they’re on the shakiest ground.

So Dr. Urbino and his wife carry this argument around for a while, allowing it to disturb their life much more that it should be allowed to do.  Dr. Urbino, who for four months has been sleeping in the study, falls asleep one night on their bed while reading.  Fermina attempts to wake him so that he will leave, but Dr. Urbino is only half awake and finds himself very comfortable in their bed.

"Let me stay here," he said.  "There was soap."