Florentino Ariza / Crazy in Love - Essay Example

? 2 May, Is the character Florentino Ariza really in love with Fermina Daza or is hea crazed stalker madman? Love in Time of Cholera is a wonderful novel that explains the significance of physical love and compares it with the emotional dimension of love. Florentino Ariza maintains a weak character as long as he cultivates the physical dimension of his love for Fermina Daza. He actually acquires Fermina only after the physical dimension of love has been outgrown by the emotional dimension. This essentially tells that the emotions in love are more important than the physical relationship between the lovers. Florentino behaves as a crazed stalker madman and his love for Fermina cultivates on physical dimension for the most part of it until the end when he convinces Fermina emotionally and makes a trustworthy partner. Like everything in this world, love has to be moderate. When the love exceeds the limit, it becomes madness. Florentino is a crazed stalker madman. This can be estimated from the fact that although Florentino Ariza claims to have fallen in love with only one lady on Earth throughout his life, he makes love with every other woman every single day. If Florentino Ariza really loved Fermina Daza, he should have reserved his physical self only for her because no woman in her normal state of mind would ever want to have a spouse who has sex with every other woman. There is no doubt in the fact that Florentino Ariza is obsessed with his love for Fermina Daza. However, this does not have anything to do with his habit of having sex. Florentino Ariza would have had sex with every woman even if Fermina had agreed to marry him in the first place. Florentino Ariza cheats on himself when he thinks that he makes love with other women in order to escape the pain of Fermina’s departure from his life. In fact, one’s actions are the outcome of several factors. In the case of Florentino Ariza, these factors include but are not limited to his lack of self control, poor character, inability to resist his unreligious and unethical physical desires and extremism. Florentino Ariza is an extremist by every sense of judgment. To any reader with shear common sense, Florentino Ariza’s claim that his habit of making love with women is nothing more than a temporal escape from the suffering of his lost sweetheart is indeed, a lame excuse. Florentino falls in love with Fermina in the first sight of her. When he first feels like falling in love with Fermina, Florentino does not know her as a person at all. All he knows about Fermina is that she is beautiful enough to touch the bottom of his heart. To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. (Marquez cited in Lombardi). This essentially speaks of the fact that his dimension of love for Fermina is purely physical. In real love, the physical self does not have much significance. True love is about emotions. Florentino Ariza is addicted to sex. He only needs a reason for his passion for sex, so that he may justify himself in the eyes of the world for his unethical act of carrying out sex out of marriage. Florentino would have been addicted to sex whether or not, Fermina had come into his life. Had he never seen Fermina, Florentino would have associated the same feelings with any other girl. In fact, Florentino was at least good enough to find a reason for his sex addiction. He might only want the reason to satisfy his own conscience, let alone the world. Every person in this world has some reason to justify his/her unethical actions, that is at least appealing to the very individual if not to others. Florentino is just another person who needs to satisfy his conscience while doing sex out of marriage so that he can enjoy the act to the maximum extent without any emotional burden on his conscience. In the book, the Florentino’s lovesickness has been compared with cholera. Like cholera affects a person, Florentino’s madness plagues his whole life. Obsessed with his insanity, Florentino displays criminal behavior on the borderline. There are several ways in which his behavior is quite unethical. He keeps an eye on someone else’s spouse for full 51 years, 9 months and 4 days, and wishes that Fermina loses her beloved husband for the sake of Florentino. If we analyze Florentino’s thinking from this angle, it becomes obvious that Florentino is more selfish than courteous towards Fermina. He wants to kill the peace of her life for the sake of his passion. He knows that Fermina does not love him, yet he wants the place of her husband. If Florentino really loved Fermina, he should have sacrificed his love and have been happy in the way nature decided things for her. Not only is Florentino a culprit of Fermina, but he is also a potential threat to his employers. He can not write a simple business letter. While writing a business letter, Florentino often gets lost in his passion and starts to write poetry instead of the letter. The business letter becomes a love letter and Florentino does not even realize that. Such an employee can cause big loss to the business. Florentino is potentially a useless individual who can not play any constructive role in the society. Florentino cultivates as many as 622 love affairs in the 51 years, 9 months and 4 days that he remains away from Fermina. No matter how hard an individual in the normal state of mind tries, he can not have more than 10 affairs throughout the life whereas Florentino manages to have them in hundreds. The number 622 speaks volumes about the madness of Florentino and his passion for physical satisfaction. It is rather unfair to call Florentino’s relationship with those 622 sex partners as love affair. They were plainly meant for physical relationship and no love whatsoever was involved in those relationships. Even Florentino acknowledges that fact as he says that those relationships were attempts of forgetting Fermina. His own conviction tells how worthless the life of Florentino is as he feels it the noblest thing on Earth to do to die for Fermina, who was never his in reality. Moreover, in his 622 love affairs, Florentino has caused irreparable loss to a lot of women as well as many people that were related to them. One of the women that Florentino held an affair with for personal gains, was murdered by her spouse. The husband assassinated his wife upon learning that she has had an affair with Florentino and has been in a physical relationship with him for quite some time. Even the last affair Florentino had with a teenage girl before reuniting with Fermina proved very unfortunate for the girl. The girl could not bear it as Florentino reverted to Fermina, and obsessed with depression, she committed suicide. All of these facts tell that Florentino is a crazed stalker madman. After more than 51 years of their separation, when Florentino and Fermina reunite, they are able to associate with each other at a more emotional level unlike their teenage association. This can be attributed to the fact that after 51 years, the physical dimension of love significantly wears off and stronger traits of love start to dominate the rapport between the two. At her husband’s death, when Florentino approaches Fermina and assures her of his long cultivated love for her, she rejects him. This so happens because Fermina has never associated with Florentino at an emotional level. 51 years back, when they had had an affair for about 4 years, it did not take Fermina long to forget Florentino as her father took her away for quite some time. She had realized that her love for Florentino was nothing more than a call of her physical self. 51 years later, Florentino is not able to make Fermina fall in real love with him unless he inspires her with his letters based on subjects that are far beyond the physical dimension of love. 51 years in addition to teenage are quite sufficient for a woman to lose her sexual strengths, though a man does not remain as sexually active or powerful either as he is in his youth. Their reunion after 51 years suggests that their relationship is going to be more of a psychological nature than a physiological one. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore. (Marquez cited in Lombardi). Works Cited: Lombardi, Esther. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes.” 2011. Web. 2 May 2011. . Read More