Love in the Time of Cholera: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

When Florentino Ariza sees Fermina and Dr. Urbino so triumphant together, he decides that he will become wealthy and powerful and wait for Fermina for the rest of his life, so that he can be worthy of her. As a result, he asks his Uncle Leo XII for a job, which he receives even though his uncle is still frustrated at Florentino’s refusal to move the year before. This reflects the fact that although Uncle Leo XII seems rigid and impassive on the outside, he actually has a passion for singing deeply emotional, compassionate songs, caring little for the material advantages of his position. His particular sensitivity allows him to tell immediately that Florentino is like his father: driven in life by love.

In the early years of Florentino’s new job at the River Company of the Caribbean, he is incapable of writing official documents because his style is too lyrical and romantic. Florentino works hard but concludes that the only thing that interests him in life is love. However, his seemingly passive attitude conceals strong power and determination, which allow him to work hard for 30 years in a wide variety of positions.

Uncle Leo XII tells Florentino that his father, Don Pius V Loayza, conceived him in an unlocked office room on a Sunday, lying to his wife about his whereabouts. Florentino is bothered by some of aspects his father’s character but realizes that others are just like him. For example, in a notebook, he finds his father’s scribble that his only regret in life would be not dying for love. Florentino also later discovers that he looks more like his father over time—and that such resemblance is a definitive sign of aging. His father never recognized Florentino as his legitimate son, and Florentino recalls his father once giving him money for the week before telling him never to return. Uncle Leo XII, however, kept on giving Tránsito Ariza money.

After work, overwhelmed by his love for Fermina, Florentino begins writing love letters free of charge in the Arcade of the Scribes. He has a steady stream of clients and once even writes back-and-forth love letters to the same girl and boy. Later, after agreeing to marry, the couple realizes what happened and asks Florentino to be their child’s godfather. Florentino also writes some of his own love letters, hoping to publish them as a book.

In the meantime, Florentino’s friends become persuaded that he has changed permanently, and Florentino knows that this is because of his unwavering resolution to win Fermina back. Tránsito Ariza helps him by buying their house, making space for Florentino to have children. During this period, Tránsito also discovers that she is suffering from an incurable illness, which affects her memory.

Florentino, in turn, has developed a steady habit of making love without actually feeling love. When he goes to the hotel of his youth, where he conducts his affairs, he dresses his lovers as men to protect their anonymity. However, when people see him enter with men, his reputation becomes even more tarnished than it already was. As a result, he begins seeking safe places to have affairs, from jetties to the lighthouse. He develops theories about love-making, concluding that the most ragged-looking women were usually the most passionate and energetic during sexual relations. Although Florentino had planned on writing about these theories, Ausencia Santander soon proves that theories about love are completely futile, since they can so easily be proven wrong.

After 20 years of marriage, Ausencia Santander and her husband have separated. She now has a regular lover, Rosendo de la Rosa, a riverboat captain, who brings Florentino to Ausencia’s house. During lunch, in which Rosendo drinks an enormous quantity of alcohol, Florentino marvels at the beauty of Ausencia’s house. When the drunken Rosendo falls asleep, Florentino and Ausencia drag him to bed, still unconscious. They then suddenly decide to undress and make love. From then on, Ausencia begins to invite Florentino over whenever Rosendo is away on trips. They are not afraid of being caught because Rosendo always announces his return with the ship’s horn, saluting his wife, children, and mistress.

At 50 years old, Ausencia is an expert in love-making. She always welcomes Florentino naked, even though he never announces himself. She undresses him immediately, but Florentino is careful to remove his watch and chain and put them in his boots, which he always does when he has affairs, so that he will not forget them. Ausencia would then climb on top of Florentino and seek her own pleasure, enraptured and passionate, leaving him with the impression that he is being used. However, his hurt pride combined with feelings of joy and happiness, and he never fails to return.

After two weeks, when Ausencia lets him kiss her before undressing him, Florentino knows that she has developed feelings for him. One day, after spending the afternoon in her bed, they leave the room to realize that thieves had come while they were making love, stealing everything in the apartment. The thieves left a note saying this was Ausencia’s fault for “fucking around.”

Florentino beings to see Ausencia less, not because of the desolation of her house but because he has discovered that he can meet people in mule-drawn trolleys. One day, during Carnival, he meets a woman who makes a lasting impression on him. She is dressed as a sick patient and tells him she is crazy; Florentino laughs. The two of them dance together, although the woman still insists she came from a psychiatric institution. Florentino offers for them to go to the lighthouse, but as they wait to watch the end of celebrations—a delay that saves his life—guards arrived to catch the woman, who had indeed escaped from the asylum after decapitating a guard and wounding others. She defends herself with hidden garden shears but is ultimately put in a straitjacket. Florentino brings chocolates to the asylum on the following days but then gives them away.

On the trolley, Florentino also meets Leona Cassiani. She is “the true woman of his life” even though they never share a sexual relationship. When he first sees her in the trolley, he notices that she is a pretty black woman but immediately recognizes her as a “whore.” Leona follows him out of the trolley and, when Florentino tells her he is not interested, she replies that she can tell he is. Florentino knows he is part of a secret society of people who immediately recognize each other, knowing they are always ready to have sex with each other. However, Leona only wants him to find her a job, and he is able to integrate her in the River Company of the Caribbean.

Leona Cassiani becomes a highly talented employee. She submits ideas to Florentino’s Uncle Leo XII to reform the company, and he ultimately creates a new position for her, allowing her to serve as his personal assistant. Within a few years, Leona has already taken control of most aspects of the company and, after a few more years, could have accepted a position of General Secretary. However, her goal throughout is only to protect her benefactor, Florentino. She finds ways to give Florentino the impression that she is following his orders when in fact the opposite is true, and she protects him from the scheming of secret enemies.

Although Florentino never fully grasps the extent of Leona’s actions, he is full of regret that he didn’t make love with Leona upon first meeting her, even if she had made him pay for it, which he usually refuses to do. One night, when both of them are working late, he suddenly enters her office and, shaking, asks her when they would ever stop what they were doing. Leona says that she has been waiting for such a moment for the past 10 years, but that it is now too late. After so much hard work on his behalf, she has grown old prematurely, even though he is 20 years older than her. She says it would feel to her like having sex with a son. Although Florentino doubts this is truly her last word, he nevertheless understands for the first time that it is possible to simply be friends with a woman.

Leona is the only person with whom Florentino ever feels inclined to share his secret love for Fermina Daza. He realizes that, apart from his mother, the only people who know about his love belong to Fermina’s world. One day, Dr. Urbino enters Florentino’s office to protect himself from a passing cyclone. Although Florentino is struck with the feeling of being inferior to Urbino, the two of them chat briefly about music. Florentino says he likes Gardel, to which Dr. Urbino replies that he is popular indeed.

Dr. Urbino was told once that Florentino had been in love with Fermina, but he had quickly forgotten it, finding the matter uninteresting. In the office, after speaking Dr. Urbino about his various musical projects, he suddenly mentions his wife, saying that he would be nothing without her. Florentino is then shocked to realize that Urbino loves Fermina as much as he does. He concludes that they are both victims, united by a shared passion, and feels grief at the thought that Urbino would have to die so that Florentino might be able to express his. When Leona Cassiani enters the office after Urbino leaves, Florentino feels the urge to tell her about Fermina but ultimately does not.

Reflecting on Dr. Urbino’s cultural activities, including the organization of the Poetic Festival, Florentino remembers that, despite participating every year, he has never won a prize. One year, a Chinese immigrant surprises everyone by winning the first prize, causing a polemic in the city. Years later, though, when the poem is reprinted, everyone realizes that the poem is not that good, and therefore could indeed have been written by the Chinese immigrant.

During that event, Florentino meets a woman wearing only black who consoles him when his name is not called. She explains that she noticed his sadness because the flower he wore was shaking. Florentino suggests the two of them go somewhere together and invites himself to her house. There, they become regular lovers, even though her cat attacks them while they are in bed. When he realizes she feels love for him, he is close to 30. The woman’s name is Sara Noriega. After a fiancé abandoned her, Sara concluded that she wanted to sleep with men anyway, regardless of whether or not she was married. She has the peculiarity of putting a pacifier in her mouth during love-making to enhance her pleasure.

Florentino makes their affair clandestine, even though Sara Noriega feels free and is not bothered to be seen with him. Throughout his life, Florentino has always made sure to maintain women’s anonymity, revealing none of their secrets. On the only occasion he left written proof of his involvement, he risked his life. He believes that he is Fermina Daza’s husband and takes part in sexual affairs without actually betraying her. To explain Florentino’s strange behavior, Tránsito believes he is incapable of love, whereas others believe that Florentino does not like women. Florentino never tries to disprove such rumors.

Florentino visits Sara Noriega on a regular basis. However, her knowledge and skill at love-making convinces Florentino that he is not, as she claimed, her first lover. This makes him feel jealous. Sara Noriega, however, insists that this is a talent some people are simply born with. On Sunday afternoons, Sara enjoys reciting poetry; Florentino wonders whether love is Sara’s passionate poetic declamations or their love-making, and she concludes that everything they do naked is love.

They submit a jointly written poem to the Poetic Festival but lose. Sara Noriega is furious because she believes that Fermina Daza plotted against her. Florentino, on the other hand, is gloomy because Fermina Daza has changed deeply and now looks like a mother. This forces him to come to terms with the fact that everything is constantly changing, including Fermina. He becomes aware of the passing of time and realizes that all he does is wait. Sara Noriega, meanwhile, calls Fermina “a whore,” saying that Fermina married Dr. Urbino without love, for his money. Sara also claims that feminine intuition told her that Fermina plotted against her to keep her from winning the poetry prize.

Then, Florentino realizes that Sara Noriega is also affected by the passing of time, as she spends more time crying and is becoming bitter. They begin to fight about the poetic prize, which Sara is very sensitive about, and Florentino realizes he wants to put an end to the relationship. However, Sara beats  him to it, suddenly announcing that she is waiting for a lover to come by and see her. Humiliated, he leaves and never sees her again. For five years, he spent many pleasant hours with Sara Noriega, feeling happy with her in bed and temporarily forgetting Fermina. As a result, their separation only heightens his longing for Fermina and his desire for Dr. Urbino to die.

Florentino concludes that he is meant to make a widow happy. In his experience of spending time with widowed women, he has realized that, despite their grief over their respective husbands’ deaths, they soon became aware that they were suddenly in control of their own lives. They spent years taking care of their husbands as they would a child and, whenever their husband left the house to work in society, they feared he might leave them forever. Love, these women accepted, belonged not to their world but to an alternative life. It is only once they became widows that they realized how free they could be to satisfy the needs of their own body. Florentino concludes that Fermina will probably become a widow exactly like these other women.

In the meantime, Fermina gives Florentino absolutely no thought. Although she once felt pity for her suitor, she never regretted her decision to reject him. She later realizes that the reason behind this decision was that she never actually knew Florentino. To her, he was a mere shadow. Dr. Urbino’s courtship, on the other hand, focused not on love but on what he could give her, such as security and order, which might in the end approximate love. At that point, Fermina had already accepted that she did not necessarily need love to live. Despite her fear that this might be her father’s plot, she agreed to marry Dr. Urbino because she felt that she was aging and would soon reach 21 years, a date before which she had hoped to settle.

It is only once Fermina returns from her honeymoon that she doubts her decision. During the next six years, she feels like a prisoner in a strange house. Fermina’s mother-in-law, Doña Blanca, a mean, bitter woman who lives with them, makes her feel inadequate by criticizing her behavior constantly. Lonely and desperate, Fermina resolves to devote her energies to her son, soon realizing that love for one’s children develops through the closeness that derives from raising them. Meanwhile, Fermina is forced to eat eggplant, which Doña Blanca insists on preparing. Doña Blanca also berates Fermina for playing the harp instead of the piano, which she considers improper in a lady. Dr. Urbino tries to intervene but Fermina ultimately submits to her “deluxe prison sentence,” surprising herself with her own abidance to the rules of high society.

Dr. Urbino argues to himself that his problems with his wife have nothing to do with the environment at home, but with the absurdity of marriage, which forces near strangers to live together perfectly while nurturing love, which, in their case, did not pre-exist their marriage. Dr. Urbino still feels enough love to ask Fermina to wash him, but in such moments, although they feel close, they fail to express their sexual desire to each other. They only make love occasionally, finding the same joy they experienced during their honeymoon, but failing to feel desire on an ordinary basis. During this period, Fermina also discovers that her father’s business has always been illegal. As a result, Lorenzo Daza leaves the country, and Fermina is relieved when she learns he had died.

Paradoxically, it is during this difficult period that Fermina and Dr. Urbino seem the happiest. Their main joy derives from their fight against the upper-class milieu, in which they succeed in introducing some modern ideas. Fermina is not intimidated by the women of high society, whose hostility, she knows, conceals fear. Therefore, by trying not to intimidate others, she is able to integrate herself into this milieu and participate in the most important cultural events of the time. This gives people the impression that Fermina and Dr. Urbino’s marriage is perfectly happy.

Once, Fermina wonders if she would have been happier with Florentino Ariza. That very night, she confides her worries to Dr. Urbino, forcing both of them to express how they really feel. They resolve to return to Europe for a trip, in order to regain their lost love. When Fermina sees Florentino Ariza on the pier as they are leaving, she feels no compassion for him, considering him a mere shadow, someone she never actually knew.

Florentino Ariza has also suffered during this period. His mother, Tránsito, is losing her memory, sometimes forgetting Florentino he is, and he spends a lot of time taking care of her.

During this time, Florentino helps a young woman, Olimpia Zuleta, find her parasol and later takes her back to her house, where she keeps many pigeons. When Florentino once sees her husband at the port, he hears the voice of the devil speaking to him. That same day, Florentino stops by Olimpia’s house. Over the next few days, Olimpia and Florentino begin exchanging secret love letters through carrier pigeons. This is the first time Florentino left written proof of his involvement with a woman, although he made sure not to write his name anywhere.

Six months after their first meeting, Florentino and Olimpia finally meet to make love in a cabin by the docks. There, Florentino writes on Olimpia’s body the sentence: “This pussy is mine,” with an arrow pointing downward. That night, when Olimpia’s husband sees this message on her body, which she has forgotten to erase, he slices her throat with a razor. The man is later captured, and Florentino fears that his secret relationship with Olimpia might come to light—not because he fears the man might find him one day, but because he doesn’t want Fermina to discover that he’s had relationships with other women. When Florentino’s mother dies, he notices that Olimpia’s grave is nearby. He plants a rosebush near her grave, which soon spreads throughout the graves.

Tránsito’s death condemns Florentino to his ordinary routine and time passes by without him noticing, until he realizes it has been years since his relationship with Olimpia and the death of his mother. When he turns 40, he discovers that he is suffering from pains in his body because of old age. Soon, he realizes that 30 years had passed since his youthful adventure with Fermina Daza.

Fermina, in the meantime, is convinced that she married the right man. She and Dr. Urbino move to a new house in La Manga and leave their previous difficulties behind. Fermina’s son, Marco Aurelio, is studying at the Medical School, and her daughter, Ofelia, looks a lot like her. The couple return from two years in Paris after hearing of Doña Blanca’s death, and Fermina is once again pregnant. Dr. Urbino sells the old palace they had lived in to buy a new house. Dr. Urbino accepts that their honeymoon could not be replicated because Fermina has given so much of her love away to her children since then. Fermina also realizes, after eating it without realizing, that she actually loves eggplant. This leads them to cook eggplant on a regular basis.

At home, Fermina concludes that she is “a deluxe servant,” serving her husband’s needs in their home even though, in society, she is the one who is taken care of and revered. Her husband’s love, she feels, is purely self-centered, because it depends on her anticipating his every desire. She does not blame Dr. Urbino for his strict demands regarding meals and household organization, blaming “life” instead. He is, as the narrator ironically mentions, an ideal husband who never cleans anything in the house. Dr. Urbino himself says that a man should have two wives: “one to love and one to sew on his buttons.”

Fermina becomes frustrated by Dr. Urbino’s lack of knowledge about the effort it takes to organize a house. Therefore, she asks him to take on her tasks for a day. Dr. Urbino is soon overwhelmed and proves helpless. He concludes that they both have their individual roles—she is a caretaker and he is a doctor—and both of them conclude that it is not possible for love to express itself in a different way than it did in their home.

Regarding Florentino, Fermina feels only pity and guilt. However, she soon becomes affected by nostalgia for the time she spent with her cousin Hildebranda, to which Florentino is connected. However, she remains devoted to Dr. Urbino, taking care of him during old age, in which he desperately needs her. It is in such moments of intense partnership that their loved reaches its fullest expression. They know that their love has conquered many obstacles, such as the daily difficulties of fights and frustrations linked to marriage, and was capable of facing many more.