Love in the Time of Cholera
My friend David tells the story of a high-stakes international smuggling operation—occurring under the cover of darkness, no less—in which he was thrust, bewilderingly, into a starring role.
It was 1984, give or take, and David was in Paris, when he made a quick trip to visit a friend in Barcelona. As the weekend drew to a close, back at the Aeroport de Barcelona-El Prat ticket counter, he was approached by a strange woman.
“Are you American?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to Paris?”
“Yes.”
“On this next flight?”
“Yes.”
She asked if he knew the name of a certain Latin American novelist. He did not. “He’s very famous,” she said. “Regardless, I’m his agent and I have an urgent need to get this manuscript to an editor in Paris.”
She handed him the stack of typed papers. David tucked them into his carry-on. He boarded the plane just like every other passenger. This being the ‘80s, he may well have smoked a cigarette during the short flight while pondering the mysteries of the universe. Whatever the case, he insists he did not read the manuscript. But if he had, he would have read, in the original Spanish, these now-recognizable words: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
The manuscript, of course, was Gabriel García Márquez’s long-awaited work Love in the Time of Cholera. The novel may have reached the editor in Paris without incident 38 years ago, but it’s just now found its way into my hands—in the form of the beautiful recent illustrated edition from Vintage.
I know better than to expect it to be quite as good as One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I'm enjoying it. So much, in fact, that I attempted to tell David’s smuggling story just now in the style of Gabo himself, that imaginative lover of absurd but truthful detail.
