I remember marrying an old couple years ago. The woman, a Filipina, was 74, and the man, an American, 70. After the rites, the man readied himself to give the woman such a kiss as would match that in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph, “V-J Day in Times Square.” But the woman, ever the demure Filipina in her old age and widowhood, averted her mouth just in time, and only allowed her uncontrollable spouse to plant a smack on her cheek.
The age of the couple and the man’s white hot passion reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, “Love in the Time of Cholera.” Florentino Ariza waited for Fermina Daza, whom he had sworn to love forever and who had married a doctor, to be free again so he could woo her back. He got the chance after 51 years, nine months and four days, after the funeral of the doctor who died from a fall while trying to catch a parrot that had escaped from its cage.
Florentino first met Fermina when he was yet a young apprentice telegrapher and delivered a telegram to her father. They became lovers in due time, maintaining their bond through letters, until Fermina’s father discovered their relationship and sent Fermina on a long journey, which was not to end until she had forgotten Florentino.
When Fermina returned, she felt only disgust for her boyfriend, and, prevailed upon by her father, married Juvenal Urbino, the city’s most esteemed doctor, a portly man of science who led the fight against cholera that was plaguing the place.
When Florentino learned of Fermina’s marriage, he vowed to make himself deserving of Fermina’s affection and to regain her no matter how long it took. In fact, he promised to remain a virgin for Fermina, a promise that was broken by the many flings that time had flung his way but which remained intact, somehow, because of his single-minded quest for Fermina. An uncle got Florentino to work for him, in due course replacing him as president of the River Company, which operated a fleet of paddle-wheel steamboats.
Despite Fermina’s initial, almost violent rejection of Florentino’s suit after her husband’s funeral, Florentino eventually succeeded in reviving their past relationship, and in the end we see the old lovers taking a river voyage together. When the ship reached its last port, and Fermina saw familiar people there and feared that a scandal might arise if they saw her, Florentino ordered the captain to raise the yellow flag, a warning that there was cholera aboard the vessel. This made sure that no passengers would be on the ship except Fermina, Florentino, the captain and his lover. It also meant that no port would allow them to dock and that they would be cruising the stream—in effect, forever.
Except for the septuagenarians, most of those who wed in my courtroom are youths, constrained to have a civil instead of a religious marriage for being short of funds, and because of the girl’s obviously growing stomach. When they recite the marriage vows, I often wonder how many of them will keep the “until death do us part” bit, and if they realize the import of Jesus’ statement in the Gospel of Mark, that since “from the beginning of creation God made them male and female,” a man must leave father and mother, “and the two become one body.”
I often end up reflecting that there must be eternity, or else there would be no point to love. For while the wedding vows fix the mutual holding and having of man and woman only during their lifetime, their love is meant to transcend death.
In his review of Marquez’s novel, Thomas Pynchon offers what he considers as its “extraordinary premise” in the form of a question:
“Suppose, then, it were possible, not only to swear love ‘forever,’ but actually to follow through on it—to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one’s allotted stake of precious time where one’s heart is?”
Pynchon goes so far as to regard the love that Marquez’s novel propounds, a love that promises to last forever, as an avowal of the resurrection, which I hasten to add is none other than the resurrection that Christ has won for us through his own Resurrection, because there is none other of the kind.
“This novel,” Pynchon writes, “is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality—youthful idiocy, to some—may yet be honoured, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable. This is, effectively, to assert the resurrection of the body, today as throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea.”