. Spinning .

"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.