57 pages • 1 hour read
Gabriel García MárquezA 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.
As Fermina Daza falls in love with her husband and becomes pregnant with her first child, Florentino Ariza works with his uncle at the riverboat company. His uncle is a kind and frugal man, and Florentino Ariza slowly makes his way up the ranks of the riverboat company, spending time at the lighthouse having affairs with women. He becomes an avid writer of love letters in the Avenue of Scribes in an earnest attempt to get rid of all the love in his system so he can write a reasonable business letter. Florentino has a few tumultuous love affairs—one with the girlfriend of a riverboat captain that ends with a robbery and threatening words on her apartment wall written by vandals. He falls in love with a plainly dressed woman during Carnival who admits to having escaped from an asylum, and during their evening together, she is captured by police and nurses.
As it turns out, she had decapitated a guard to escape in order to dance at Carnival. Florentino visits her at the asylum every week, with a box of chocolates and a perennial hope that he will see her through the barred windows. Finally, Florentino Ariza meets Leona Cassiani, a woman he mistakes for a prostitute who asks him for a low-paying job at the riverboat company. She is a shrewd and savvy woman with a heart of gold who makes her way steadily up the ranks, helping Florentino Ariza achieve his dreams out of sheer gratitude. Leona Cassiani is the only woman Florentino doesn’t make love to—from Leona, he learns that he can befriend a woman, not just love her.
One day, Dr. Juvenal Urbino goes to the shipping company building to declare that he suspects a cyclone is coming to the city. Florentino Ariza must entertain him because his uncle is taking a siesta. In that moment, Florentino realizes that Urbino is a pleasant man, and Florentino feels sad that Urbino must die for Florentino to have the love of his dreams. During their conversation, Urbino reminds Florentino of Florentino’s love for the annual poetry festival, where he met one of his long-time lovers, a fellow poet who had never married. Their affair was long, ending when the woman accused Fermina Daza of being a whore after the awards ceremony at the poetry festival, over which Fermina Daza presided. At this festival, Florentino realized that the love of his life was aging, and so was he—he realized “his life was passing while he did nothing more than wait” (194).
During these years, Fermina Daza grows similarly dissatisfied with her life. After her honeymoon, she had moved into her husband’s palatial home, and for six years, she was miserable living alongside his judgmental mother and somber sisters. Her only consolation was her son, whom she did not like after his birth but who became her only friend in the house. After Lorenzo Daza was sent back to his home country to avoid a legal scandal, Fermina decorated her old home as a museum to her past, and she went there to avoid her new life. When Fermina Daza tells Urbino of her misery, they decide to set sail for Europe to find their love again.
Tránsito Ariza, Florentino’s mother, loses her memory and spends each day dressing up and pretending to be a little girl from a children’s book. Florentino spends his spare time caring for his mother. During this period, he falls in love with a woman he rescues during a windstorm. His new lover keeps carrier pigeons and offers him one. After a persistent courtship by letter, they finally consummate their affair, and Florentino paints on his lover’s body with spare paint in the cottage where they sleep. When she returns home she undresses in front of her husband, forgetting the paint, and he slashes her throat with a razor blade. Florentino is terrified, and the man goes promptly to prison. Fermina Daza and Urbino return from Europe after hearing of Urbino’s mother’s sudden death. She is pregnant again. They sell Urbino’s palace home and build a new home on La Manga, and Fermina Daza feels happy then, though she sometimes struggles with waves of painful nostalgia when she thinks of her youth. As they age, Fermina Daza and Urbino fall into a domestic routine, enjoying the best time of their marriage.
The interconnectedness of love and suffering is the primary theme of this section of the novel, as Fermina Daza struggles to adapt to married life and Florentino Ariza has a number of love affairs that challenge his commitment to Fermina as well as his perceptions of true love.
Fermina Daza’s struggle is a quiet one. After the romance of her European honeymoon, she returns home and feels lost in the grief-stricken palace of her husband’s family home. This house is haunted by the spirits of the past, and Fermina is burdened by these memories. As well, she is a person who thrives on independence, so she drowns in her mother-in-law’s judgements and the monotony of dismal dinners each night. She feels isolated from her husband, and that isolation makes her wonder about both love and marriage—she questions whether she was ever in love with Urbino at all, or if that faux love was just the illusion of their fantasy world of Europe. Her suffering is internal and tied to her fantasies of what love would be; her marriage to Urbino does not meet her expectations, and so she begins to question everything about her love.
Meanwhile, Florentino experiences love and suffering as a bystander, witnessing the pain of others and taking part in it from a distance. For example, during his encounter with a woman from the asylum who decapitates a guard to go dancing at Carnival, he falls in love with her, only to discover the truth of her character. Her suffering combines with his ongoing love for her, and passion and pain intertwine. Florentino has another brutal experience when he engages with a married woman; her husband discovers their affair and slits her throat in despair for himself, for his wife, and for his own illusions about their marriage. Florentino fears for his own life, suffering for love himself, and the husband, who acts violently out of his own grief and shame, suffers as well for everything he has lost.
By Gabriel García Márquez