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But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.
I read Love in the Time of Cholera when I was twenty-four. It seemed to me a paean to romantic love, the kind that, at that unripe age, I could still idealize. I was also captivated by the adventures of the main characters. I recently read it again. Coincidentally, I read it several months before the 2019 coronavirus showed up in Wuhan. I jumped into the book with the expectation of being taken along for a rollicking ride where the main characters' undying passion for one another would swirl and swoop in and around me. What I found, thirty years' of experience and a psychoanalysis later, was a much more twisted sort of love story than I had remembered it to be, where a melodramatic notion of love, the kind of adolescent—or even infantile—love that likely appealed to me in my young adulthood was pockmarked with acts of cruelty and mendacity, with exploitation and prejudice aimed at those with less power. Despite the pleasure I took in taking in Márquez's vivid writing, I found it hard to get through. I hung in there, perhaps brought along by the book's poeticism and Márquez's way of telling tales that wend in intertwining serpentine strands. But it left me sad and wondering whether I had participated in something hurtful, something exploitative.