Love in the Time of Cholera

Dr. Juvenal Urbino is a wealthy doctor and Fermina Daza’s husband of fifty years: “He was not only the city’s oldest and most illustrious physician, he was also its most fastidious man” (2). Urbino dedicates himself to his work and his passion for civic projects and the arts, using the his powerful sense of nostalgia to remake his city so that it suits his taste.

Urbino’s relationship to love is cold. He does not love his wife when he marries her, and he seeks stability from marriage, not passion; when Urbino finally finds passion in his adulterous relationship with Barbara Lynch late in his life, the experience of passion with Barbara makes him sick, angry, and impersonal towards his wife; he finds no pleasure in the act of sleeping with another woman. For Urbino, love is either impersonal or obsessive. His death allows his wife to experience a broader spectrum of love, though she continues to be haunted by his ghost after his death. 

Florentino Ariza is Fermina Daza’s lifelong lover. He is the child of unmarried parents and a member of the lower middle class who works his way into a position of prominence in the city. Over his lifetime, he has more than six hundred affairs while waiting for Fermina Daza to love him.

Florentino Ariza has two ways of experiencing love—romantic love and physical love. He loves Fermina Daza romantically, yet they do not touch each other for fifty years. He replaces the loss of his romantic love with physical love and finds solace in these frequent and brief affairs. Florentino Ariza grows as a character when Fermina Daza teaches him, at the end of the novel, that romantic love is not illusory or flowery—it is authentic and comfortable. Though he learns about real love late in his life, Florentino Ariza realizes that love is a limitless resource for those willing to give it. 

Jeremiah de Saint-Amour is a friend of Urbino’s who dies by his own hand on his sixtieth birthday out of fear of old age. His death by suicide is the first suicide in the book, and his death sets the tone of suffering in the novel. Saint-Amour is not who he says he is; for example, he lies about being a war hero and he hides his lover from his friends. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour is a symbol of the unknowable nature of the internal life of human beings, a theme that applies to the development of the three main characters in the novel.

Tránsito Ariza is Florentino Ariza’s mother. She keeps a notions shop where she gets rich off of the pawned jewels of rich women who have fallen on hard times. She is an upwardly mobile middle-class woman, who is dedicated to her son and supportive of his love for Fermina Daza. She dies after a prolonged period of dementia, and she is the woman Florentino Ariza loves most in the world, after Fermina Daza. 

Hildebranda Sánchez is the cousin of Fermina Daza. Her story mirrors Fermina Daza’s story in many ways—she is a wild, independent woman who has a forbidden love when she is a young girl, and she becomes a married mother despite her love for another. Hildebranda plays a pivotal role in Fermina Daza’s history and Fermina’s understanding of herself.

Lorenzo Daza is Fermina Daza’s degenerate father. He is a drunk and a crook, and he hides his criminal enterprises from his daughter until the day of his death. As a former solider in exile who comes from nothing, he is dedicated to moving his child up in social class.

Leona Cassiani is Florentino Ariza’s assistant. She is a smart, savvy woman whom Florentino ironically mistakes for a prostitute when they first meet; unlike most women who meet Florentino, she does not engage in sex with Florentino. Though Leona’s character is minor, represented only by her commitment to loyalty and her steadfast character, her role in the novel is significant; she exists in the novel to show Florentino Ariza that a woman can be his friend and need not always be his lover. 

América Vicuña is the fourteen-year-old ward of Florentino Ariza and his final love affair before he finally wins the love of Fermina Daza. The two begin a sexual relationship despite their sixty-year age difference, and when Florentino leaves América for Fermina Daza, she fails her secondary school exams and kills herself. 

Barbara Lynch is a Doctor of Theology who takes on Dr. Juvenal Urbino as her lover. She nearly causes the end of Fermina Daza’s marriage, though ultimately Urbino chooses his wife over his younger lover, realizing the love he had for Barbara was fleeting and problematic.