Amor
The ending of Marquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera is the most evocative I’ve ever read and has stayed with me for years.
Its final scenes leave us on a slow cruise down the mighty Rio Magdalena, an inevitable destination ahead but with plenty of possibility along the way.
It’s a book about love, but Marquez is no romantic.
His kind of love is that which holds you by the throat with one hand while silently ripping your guts out with the other.
He explores love at the extremes. It’s a disease, an obsession, a mania, a curse of the human condition that drives its victims to bitterness, resentment or an endless quest for lust in the arms of anyone but their unobtainable beloved.
Marquez describes many a night of hammock hopping, wandering hands in the darkness and visits to brothels where men weep in the arms of paid-for women until dawn.
But the ending of Love in the Time of Cholera is different, it evokes a sweeter, calmer, gentler kind of love.
The water of the river offers cool repose from the heat of the shore, though the evenings still carry the hot and sticky haze of the day.
I contemplated this on my own cruise down the Magdalena.
Love on the river is an old love; slow, steady and flowing in one inevitable direction.
Young love belongs to the sea, where you either can frolic joyfully in the waves, or be swamped by tides more powerful than you’re able to endure.
Like so many of us at times, the characters in Marquez’s books are in over their heads.
Towards the end of our cruise, the boat stopped so we could enjoy the sunset.
There’s nothing so every day as a sunset, yet we excitedly take pictures and selfies like it’s the last or most beautiful we’ll ever see.
Love is not dissimilar, so inevitable as to be commonplace, yet time and time again we run gamely, like mad amnesiacs, into the waves.
I don’t think a photo can ever quite capture a sunset, but I do think words can get us pretty close to love, so I’ll leave these final ones to the master:
““He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run through by a spear.””
