Under the yellow cholera flag: Gabriel Garciá Márquez, Love in the time of cholera

ByBy literary scholar Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

This is a strange story told by Gabriel García Márquez in his novel Love in the time of cholera (Span. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, published in 1985): Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza fall in love at a young age. Fermina’s father, however, is against the relationship and takes his daughter on a journey to visit distant relatives and to make her forget Ariza. To no avail: the two-year separation only intensifies the couple’s love, and they find ways to communicate with each other in writing without her father noticing. When Fermina is finally allowed to return to her hometown and she is suddenly faced by Florentino Ariza, she is given a fright, because the inconspicuous and aged Florentino is very different to the ideal image that she has created of him in his absence. She breaks up with him on the spur of the moment and, after certain frictions, marries the distinguished doctor Juvenal Urbino, with whom she then has a reasonably happy marriage for over fifty years. When her husband dies, Florentino is back at the door and, through sheer perseverance, manages to win back his former love, who appears reluctant at first. Fermina Daza finally relents on a river cruise to which Florentino Ariza, now president of the RCC River Navigation Company, has invited her. Both in their seventies, they spend days of late happiness on the ship. The only thing that worries them is the thought of the end of the voyage: the new relationship appears unviable in the old life on land, where resistance is expected from Ferina’s family and society, which has a low opinion of Ariza. When Florentino Ariza asks the Captain whether it might be possible to extend the voyage, the Captain has an idea:

"The Captain said that it was possible, but only hypothetically. The RCC had business commitments that Florentino Ariza was more familiar with than he was, it had contracts for cargo, passengers, mail, and a great deal more, and most of them were unbreakable. The only thing that would allow them to bypass all that was a case of cholera on board. The ship would be quarantined, it would hoist the yellow flag and sail in a state of emergency. Captain Samaritano had needed to do just that on several occasions because of the many cases of cholera along the river, although later the health authorities had obliged the doctors to sign certificates that called the cases common dysentery. Besides, many times in the history of the river the yellow plague flag had often been flown in order to evade taxes, or to avoid picking up an undesirable passenger, or to elude inopportune inspections. Florentino Ariza reached for Fermina Daza’s hand under the table."
(Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the time of cholera; translated by Edith Grossman, pp. 342-343)

No sooner said than done. The Captain also takes an old love on board, and, under the yellow cholera flag fluttering “jubilantly” on the main mast (p. 343), they enjoy the pleasures of late happiness. Nevertheless, in sober moments, the passengers reflect on the inevitable end of their cruise, which must inevitably lead to “the horror of real life” (p. 346). But the imaginative power of love is able to rise above this gloomy prospect. Having waited for Fermina Daza for fifty-three years, Florentino Ariza comes to a decision: he gives the Captain the order just to “keep going, going, going”, back and forth on the Great Magdalena River – “Forever” (348). And with this word the novel ends.

Plague and cholera are present in the novel from the beginning and in a way frame this love story. There are repeated allusions to earlier epidemics, the water in the bay is “miasmic” (p. 18), and in fact cholera is raging in the south of the country. Fermina Daza’s husband, Dr. Urbino Juvenal, is a cholera expert who has rendered outstanding services to containing the disease in his country. As in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (see the dossiers “Space” and “Masks”), love and disease are closely linked, even identified with each other. García Márquez is helped here by the fact that “cólera” in Spanish also means “anger” and “wrath”. After writing his first love letter to Fermina Daza, the young Florentino Ariza sees his anguish “complicated by diarrhoea and green vomit, he became disoriented and suffered from sudden fainting spells, and his mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera” (p. 61). And, when the aged Florentino first pays his respects to the widow Daza, his excitement causes him diarrhoea. “Be careful, Don Floro”, his worried driver says to him, “that looks like cholera” (p. 305). Love and disease are thus related metaphorically. One tertium comparationis is not only the violence of the infection, but also the phantasmatic power associated with it, which at a young age, when the couple were separated, nourished love all the more, just as it makes the bold end of the novel possible according to the laws of magical realism. That people generally use the phantasm of the plague in a devious and varied way is shown not only by the yellow plague flag under which the love ship sails at the end of the novel, but also by the actions of authorities, doctors, and tax evaders mentioned in the quotation ...

The fact that the life of the old lovers – Florentino perceives in the lover the “smell of human fermentation” and assumes that “he must give off the same odour” (p. 355) – finds its fulfilment on a ship calls up another symbolic image. The lovers come together on a river cruise, so to speak, which brings to mind modern cruise ships – standing for luxury and pleasure, such ships also became so-called hotspots in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. We inevitably also think of the boat that the mythical ferryman Charon rows across the River Styx, transporting people to Hades. In García Márquez’s case, the place of Charon is obviously taken by Samaritano. The heterotopic location of the ship (to use Foucault’s term), where encounters are possible that would normally meet with limits in real life, ultimately stands for the passage between life and death. It is the life marked by death that may celebrate itself here once again. The fact that the protagonist Fermina Daza is portrayed as an old woman in decline, who has lost much of her former beauty, and that her lover Florentino Ariza is not much better off, brings to mind the allegorical embodiments of plague and death described in Jens Niebaum’s contribution. In the face of death, the lovers themselves become personifications of death in their late happiness.