Late-Life Love Read online

  Sexuality in old age requires a sense of humor as well as patience. When Fermina Daza takes the “final step,” she finds her lover “unarmed.” Yet the next day, refreshed, “his guard was up, and she realized that he did not expose his weapon by accident, but displayed it as if it were a war trophy in order to give himself courage.” Though the rushed act of intercourse—the first time she has made love in over twenty years—leaves her disappointed, they are satisfied with the joy of being together.

  But isn’t there something sinister about the means by which the couple extend their shipboard romance? The only way to bypass taking on cargo and other passengers involves hoisting the flag of cholera. With the yellow flag raised, the New Fidelity changes course while Fermina Daza helps Florentino Ariza take his enemas and brushes his false teeth. After a dance, “they made the tranquil, wholesome love of experienced grandparents.” Florentino Ariza vows to sail with her up and down the river eternally, for their love “was more solid the closer it came to death.” What they want is what many lovers want: “a little cosmos (with its own time, its own logic) inhabited only by ‘the two of us,’ ” as Roland Barthes put it.

  Though I rejoice in the antique lovers’ union, I find all the signs of degeneration unnerving: the yellow cholera flag as well as the cold hands, sour smells, deafness, enemas, and false teeth. Are these aged lovers traveling on a ship of fools or a ship of death? Both seem oblivious to the erosive undertow that their author depicts. I quickly go online, because that current reminds me of John Betjeman’s poem “Late-Flowering Lust”:

  My head is bald, my breath is bad,

  Unshaven is my chin.

  I have not now the joys I had

  When I was young in sin.

  Like García Márquez, Betjeman knew that the young have no monopoly on lust, which nevertheless undergoes a transformation in old age, for the deterioration of the body infiltrates the urgency of desire with thoughts of its demise.

  At a reunion, when the speaker of Betjeman’s poem embraces a responsive woman, the act of intimacy leads him to picture two clasping skeletons:

  Dark sockets look on emptiness

  Which once was loving-eyed,

  The mouth that opens for a kiss

  Has got no tongue inside.

  Betjeman’s haunted luster realizes how little time he has left and then what painful probabilities await him in the near future. The jaunty light verse rhythms and rhymes underscore the grotesque surrealism of late-flowering lust.

  The late-flowering consummation that concludes García Márquez’s novel conflates love and death, Eros and Thanatos, not only in images of bodily decay and cholera but also in a devastated natural setting for which Florentino Ariza is partly responsible. The uncontrolled deforestation undertaken by his riverboat company has razed the colossal trees, along with the parrots and monkeys who depended on the forest’s foliage. By day, the lovers see “calcinated flatlands stripped of entire forests that had been devoured by the boilers of the riverboats and the debris of god-forsaken villages”; by night they smell “the nauseating stench of corpses floating down to the sea” in a “ravaged land.”

  Florentino Ariza had ignored early reports about the alarming state of the river because his mind had been “clouded by his passion.” Traveling up and down a spoiled wasteland, the lovers on the New Fidelity resemble the ghosts on the legendary ship of the Flying Dutchman, fated never to find port and sighted by sailors as a portent of doom. Was Florentino Ariza’s love an obsession, a compulsion that effectively blinded him to the devastation he and his company were in fact effecting and that his own body was undergoing? Had his mother assumed that “the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera” because romantic love is a disease? And what about her lovesick son’s catalogue of “six hundred twenty-two entries of long-term liaisons”? What sort of newfangled, rinky-dink fidelity is that?

  “Love is like a fever,” Stendhal insisted; “it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.” “Love is a universal migraine,” Robert Graves once declared. Robert Lowell likened it to delirium, Roland Barthes to the madness of wanting “nothing but the two of us.” The Greek poets “represent eros as an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster,” according to the classicist Anne Carson. We yearn and ache for who we want. How my knees weakened, my palms sweat, my pulse raced, my stomach flip-flopped, my face tingled when (after the mistimed first kiss at Lake Ogle) Don stopped by my office—tipping his chair back at a precarious angle, an index finger propped at each temple—to propose another walk or lunch.

  And then again at our first Valentine’s Day dinner date, when I knew, but he did not yet know, that I wore a garter belt and stockings under my dress. A note that I had asked the waiter to conceal in his dessert—it said “Darling, you send me”—was illegible from melted chocolate. Which one of us had started that odd custom: his leaving a tender index card under the pillow or in a briefcase at my house, my sticking a Post-it note with endearments on the desk at his? Not even the embarrassment of my children blundering into our secret assignations stopped us from continuing them. Nor did living together put an end to the amorous messages. After our wedding in the jail, on our one-night honeymoon in Louisville’s Seelbach Hotel, his postcard in my laptop case read, “Our love is here to stay.” According to García Márquez, irrational love—“the alpha and omega, an end in itself”—encapsulates us, making us do what we should not do, obscuring vision and obliterating reason.

  All sorts of sinister sexual escapades undertaken by Florentino Ariza and also by Dr. Urbino keep worrying me, while I pack Don into the back seat of the car and the walker into the trunk and then unpack them at the Trace or the Inverness, carrying García Márquez back and forth. Just as Florentino Ariza ignored reports about the ruined river, in reading the novel had I skipped to the consummation of his desire, ignoring upsetting information along the way? What did García Márquez mean when he remarked about this novel that he had set a “trap” for the reader? As I helped Don in the bathroom and the bedroom, I puzzled over the maze of García Márquez’s multiple stories: I had been rooting for Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza and then for Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. How can I process disturbing passages that seem to satirize their—and also my—romance with later-life romance?

  It was a historic day—both joyous and heartbreaking—when we managed to tape a garbage bag around Don’s braced leg, seat him on a plastic bench positioned half in and half out of the bathtub, and use the handheld shower that Julie had installed. On June 26, the Supreme Court ruled that gay people could marry and President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” in a South Carolina church where African American worshippers had been massacred. An epidemic of gun violence was devastating the country. That its victims were so often people of color might explain why the tradition I have so far found is overwhelmingly white. In García Márquez’s novel, most of the darker-skinned characters do not live long enough to experience late-life love. Or is there a different attitude toward aging—toward its physical manifestations—in cultures less saturated by Catholicism or Puritanism . . . with all their suspicions about the body?

  After watching the late-night news, after wheeling Don into the bedroom to help him get undressed, I started a load of laundry, recalling Don’s story about a colleague who taught with him at Stillman College back in the sixties. Jim had arrived in Alabama from Connecticut with a sick wife and three little kids in tow. Relieved at finding a laundromat, he interpreted the signs “Colored” and “White” to mean that one set of machines was for colored clothes, the other for white. When his students learned of his mistake, Don said, Jim could do no wrong.

  It was time to shut off all the lights and gaze out the windows facing the meadow. There they were, tiny gems of light, rising and glowing, flickering, floating here and there. Were there fewer of them this year than that memorable time when Don and I had brought out towels and lain down in the darkness to marvel at the
mesmerizing light show of what seemed like an infinitude of delicate fireflies?

  During the magical summer weeks that we spent at Bellagio—astonished by the majesty of the view of Lake Como from our window—a residency in a retreat for artists and scholars gave us a taste of the aristocratic life: maids cleaning our suite, chefs preparing our meals, a villa with gracious public rooms. In 2001, we hiked up and down the steep steps to the village, overwhelmed by the olive groves, the Alps in the distance, the gelato. Or was it 2004 at Bogliasco, where we had hilarious conversations with Italians who spoke as little English as we did Italian? We wondered whether we had missed the firefly season or if it was a Midwestern phenomenon.

  Ah, I suddenly realized, García Márquez was thinking about Italy. It hit me that Love in the Time of Cholera nods at Thomas Mann’s famous depiction of love in a time of cholera, Death in Venice. I had no desire to reread Mann’s account of a fifty-year-old male writer’s obsession with a fourteen-year-old boy. In the vise of gerontophobia, Thomas Mann linked aging with predatory sexuality and degeneration. But García Márquez was raising ominous questions about later-life love that I had not previously considered, or maybe I had marginalized them. Does love isolate us from the world outside its bubble? Should late-life love be judged and found wanting because it sequesters us from disasters in which we are complicit?

  I had finished García Márquez’s novel, but it hadn’t finished with me. Further sobering reflection on the human capacity for perversity, delineated in many interpolated scenes within his profoundly disquieting magnum opus, might help me understand the wide range of roles Eros plays in the lives of the aging and the aged.

  What’s Love Got to Do with It?

  IF LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA mocks late-life romanticism as harmful escapism, is García Márquez implicitly challenging the basis of this book and my life? Does his novel issue a warning that my absorption in later-life love, and my curiosity about stories of later-life love, might be misguided? Shouldn’t I be attending to more important matters—like global warming, rising poverty rates, gun violence at home, and terrorism overseas?

  Best to take a walk when reaching such an impasse, I decided on a hot afternoon free from the need to traipse to the Trace. With the help of the walker, Don got down the brick walkway and onto the circle of beauty with me at his side. The circle of beauty, a potholed oval driveway in front of the Inverness, gained its name by virtue of the dogwoods, tulip poplars, pear trees, towering firs, lilac bushes, and massive beech gracing its prospects, some outside and some inside the driveway.

  “I’ve drafted a letter to Fran,” I told Don, as we inched forward, “a real letter, snail mail. Every time the phone rings, every time the iPhone pings, I think it must be her. Every time I go to the mailbox, I think, ‘Surely she’s written.’ In the letter I make it clear that I understand we have been on ‘different wavelengths’ and respect her commitment to seclusion, but I also say that her absence during your surgeries really upset me.”

  Don was looking down, not at me or out at the trees or up to the sky, a Mediterranean blue with the curlicue of a cloud. He had heard most of this before, interminably, but not about the letter.

  “Basically I say that her withdrawal has hurt me; I needed more engagement from her than she seemed able or willing to offer.”

  To my chagrin, he was still looking down as we crept forward up a slight incline. I can walk short distances fairly easily, but for some incomprehensible reason—maybe the daily cancer medication—standing up while standing still makes my spine ache and I realized that I was stooping, waiting for him to progress.

  “I end by grieving our ‘abandoned intimacy’ and admitting that I have no insight into what to do about it. Why are you looking down? Do you think I shouldn’t mail it? Why are you wincing?”

  “Every pebble, every twig and acorn hurts.”

  “You shouldn’t have to walk in those socks. We need to buy extra-wide shoes.”

  “It might make you feel better, trying to resume the relationship,” he said, not noticing the marigolds and zinnias that had just been planted near the cosmos by the front door.

  As always, inside we parted ways, Don to the sunlit front room with its white carpet and wingback chair near the window bird-feeder, me to the colorful but dark family room where I used a tissue to protect my fingers while struggling to turn the tiny switch on the torch lamp. Like a magnet, García Márquez’s novel drew me back to the septuagenarian libertine Florentino Ariza, whose fanatical obsession with love results not only in ecological but also in human catastrophes. Why had I sidelined these debacles, when they are so deeply offensive?

  Florentino Ariza’s adventures in eroticism over five decades involve his hunting some six hundred twenty-two widows, wives, and girls in bawdy encounters with lusty women delighted by his philandering, including one who reaches orgasm while sucking an infant pacifier. But two of his exploits, one in the middle and one at the end of Love in the Time of Cholera, prove that Florentino Ariza’s career as a Don Juan caused the wrongful deaths of some of the women who reciprocated his advances.

  After an exchange of love notes through pigeon carriers, Florentino Ariza pursued an affair with one Olimpia Zuleta, who “preferred to remain naked for several hours in a slow-moving repose that was, for her, as loving as love itself.” After one session of voluptuous modeling or cradling, he dipped his finger in a can of red paint, drew “an arrow of blood pointing south,” and wrote on her belly “This pussy is mine”: “That same night, Olimpia Zuleta undressed in front of her husband, having forgotten what was scrawled there, and he did not say a word, his breathing did not even change, nothing, but he went to the bathroom for his razor while she was putting on her nightgown, and in a single slash he cut her throat.” What distresses the monomaniacal Florentino Ariza about the event is not the shocking murder but “the misfortune of Fermina Daza’s learning about his infidelity.”

  In the second, equally scandalous incident, fourteen-year-old América Vicuña, “entrusted by her family to Florentino Ariza as her guardian and recognized blood relative,” is led with the “gentle astuteness” of “a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse.” A kind grandfather’s secret slaughterhouse? A septuagenarian hitting on his teenage ward? For her, “the doors of heaven opened” and “she burst into flower”; for him, the affair has “the charm of a restorative perversion.” Under the cover of their kinship and extreme difference in ages, “he loved her with more anguish than any other, because he was certain he would be dead by the time she finished secondary school.”

  When Florentino Ariza abruptly drops her because of his reunion with the widowed Fermina Daza, América Vicuña takes the initiative in bed—“she cut him into pieces with malicious tenderness, she added salt to taste, pepper, a clove of garlic . . . until he was seasoned and on the platter, and the oven was heated to the right temperature”—but he resists. Later, she discovers typed copies of his correspondence with Fermina Daza. And while the aging lovers sail on the New Fidelity, they receive a telegram: “América Vicuña . . . had drunk a flask of laudanum stolen from the school infirmary.”

  What’s love got to do with a pederast who has served as an accomplice to suicide and murder, I worried as I waited for Fran’s response to my letter and as the pastoral quiet of the Inverness was shattered night and day by what sounded like bombs and blasts before and during Independence Day. Especially the suicide of the resonantly named América, who leaves no note to impugn anyone, disrupts the happily-ever-after of Love in the Time of Cholera. Florentino Ariza’s obsession with Fermina Daza insulated him within a fanatical quest that effectively drained other human beings of reality. At any age, it seems, love is blind. Oblivious to the vulnerability of the women he pursues and of the river his company exploits, Florentino Ariza stands condemned of the devastation of human lives and of the earth’s natural resources.

  Could serious ethical charges also be leveled against Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daz
a? Their conjugal bliss culminates at a gala dinner when she relishes helpings of pureed eggplant, begins serving the eggplant she had previously forsworn, and embraces her role in the marriage as “a deluxe servant.” In domestic servitude, Fermina Daza “was absolute monarch of a vast empire of happiness, which had been built by [her husband] and for him alone. She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anyone else in the world, but only for his own sake: she was in his holy service.”

  This love “only for his own sake” might be what D. H. Lawrence had in mind when he considered marriage a form of “égoïsme à deux.” Iris Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, used the phrase “solitude à deux” to describe “the inward self-isolation of a couple from anything outside their marriage.” García Márquez associates the cooing of couples inside their cages with love that quarantines us from “cholera” (all the various evils of the world). Within Dr. Urbino’s “vast empire,” he and his wife remain oblivious to and yet complicit in the economic inequities and color prejudice bequeathed by Spanish colonization. García Márquez criticizes the deeply imbedded racism of Colombian society in a sequence of scenes about a mixed race woman who turns out to be Dr. Urbino’s single marital infidelity and the reason for a two-year separation from his wife.

  Fermina Daza’s habit of sniffing laundry leads her to confront Dr. Urbino, at which point the ghost of Miss Barbara Lynch enters the house. An “elegant, large-boned mulatta,” whose “sex seemed more pronounced than that of other human beings,” Barbara Lynch had inspired a “mad passion that could endanger the stability of [the doctor’s] marriage.” When Dr. Urbino visited Barbara Lynch in her home, she gave him “the opportunity to seduce her but not to penetrate her inner sanctum, even when she was alone. She would go no further than allowing him to repeat the ceremony of palpation and auscultation with all the ethical violations he could desire, but without taking off her clothes.” To keep up the appearance of house calls, he stays only for the amount of time it takes to give an injection.