El Amor En Los Tiempos Del Colera

This is why her eventual acceptance of Florentino is so powerful. She does not return to him because of his poetry or his promises. She returns to him because, after 51 years, she is finally free from social expectation. She no longer needs to be the perfect wife. She can be herself—an old woman who likes to smoke, who hates corsets, who wants to travel.

This is perhaps the novel’s most radical message. In literature, old age is for reflection, not action. García Márquez gives us explicit, awkward, beautiful scenes of elderly sexuality. When Florentino and Fermina finally make love, they are thin, they smell of old age, they have to help each other undress. And yet, it is more romantic than any teenage kiss. El Amor en Los Tiempos Del Colera