Aging, But Not-So-Gracefully.

Growing up, I always told my mom that I didn’t want to live past sixty-five. I know it is a little morbid but I thought that would give me enough time to do all the things that are important to me—get married, raise a family, and then watch my children have kids of their own. What more could there be? I can’t imagine that anything significant or exciting happens past that age. Obviously Florentino and I share some similarities—we are both gerontophobic.

Although Florentino never says he wants to die at an early age, he does every thing he can to keep himself young. I believe that had Florentino not been living for Fermina’s love, he would have preferred to die much earlier than he did so that he did not have to witness his body begin to atrophy. I reached a conclusion on the subject: living is only necessary when a body has a purpose. Dying without succeeding in telling Fermina how he feels would have been ludicrous for both Florentino’s sake and also for the literary purpose of not disappointing the reader.

Florentino never explicitly describes a fear of growing old but he takes care of himself impeccably and chases after women young enough to be his granddaughters. This behavior is character of a person who does not want to recognize the passing of time. Florentino repeatedly says that the only time he ever realizes so many years have gone by is when he sees the many changes in both Fermina’s physical appearance and her demeanor.

The theme of gerontophobia is so important in Love in the Time of Cholera that Gabriel Garcia Marquez presents it on the very first page. The reader quickly learns that an acquaintance of Dr. Juvenal Urbino has killed himself. We also learn that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s death by gold cyanide is not motivated by love like other similar cases, but rather by the fear of getting old. Unlike Florentino and many others that suffer from gerontophobia, Jeremiah submits to his fear and ends his life. Obviously when deciding if old age can be an exhilarating or fruitful, Jeremiah determined that it could not and therefore resolved to dying not a day past sixty years old.

Another character who has an unfavorable opinion about the elderly is Fermina Daza’s daughter Ofelia. She despises the new bond that her mother makes with Florentino. She even calls love at her mother’s age revolting. Although he initially argues with his sister and supports the companionship between Fermina and Florentino, Fermina’s son, Dr. Urbino Daza, also has some strong prejudices against the elderly. He says, “Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.” (312) In his mind, the slowest is synonymous with the oldest. He envisions a world in which the elderly are isolated from the rest of the population in communities that can spare them the embarrassment of not being able to take care of themselves any longer—much like modern-day retirement homes. He also believes that seventy years of life should be somewhat of a cut-off point.

Marquez depicts in one sentence that Love in the Time of Cholera is based in a society that subscribes to the belief that there is a point one reaches in his or her life when the body is half decayed while the person is still alive. In some ways though, the union of Fermina and Florentino is able to refute the common assumptions that living at an old age is a death sentence in itself. By living and not surrendering to the temptations of death, they discover that vitality does not disappear with age.