Why does Love in the Time of Cholera STINK?
It was inevitable; the smell of horse manure and jasmine always reminded her of hot summer nights outside the palace walls of Seville.
Twenty-something years ago, I had the incredible luck to win a grant that paid for my airfare to Spain, where I spent two weeks learning the language. At the time, I was doing my PhD at UCLA, and a summer vacation in Madrid the year before had sparked a love affair with everything Spanish that has only grown more intense over the years.
My first night was a bust. I was given a room on the top floor of an old building without air conditioning or even a fan, and had to haul two heavy suitcases up four flights of stairs, resulting in several pulled muscles and an intense headache. As it was Sunday and there was no one I could contact, I took matters into my own hands, dragged my suitcases all the way down again, and checked into a nearby hotel in the old town.
After a restorative shower and a long siesta, I went out to explore the city. I am Greek and used to unbearably hot summers, but the heat that was blowing through the streets that evening was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was a fierce, dry heat that seemed to seep into everything around me and radiate it back into the air, mingling smells of sun-baked stone, paella and fried garlic.
As I was strolling along the palace walls, listening to the notes drifting from a concert behind them, that same hot summer air carried to my nostrils the discordant smells of horse manure and jasmine. The two smells rose up the air swirling together in a dissonant dance — or so it seemed at first. The manure came from the horses pulling the horse-drawn carriages, while the jasmine was climbing up the walls filling the air with its fragrance.
I stayed in Seville for ten days. Every evening I would stroll along the walls, catching the errants notes of the concert that was playing somewhere beyond them, until the smells of manure and jasmine no longer felt like clashing opposites but complementary and harmonious. This was not an accidental dance: they were both fixtures of the sensory identity of the old city.
This memory from twenty years ago slowly resurfaced in my mind as I started reading Love in the Time of Cholera. The sensory landscape is so intense that you can almost smell the suffocating stench of the marshes, the offal of the slaughtered animals, exhaust fumes from the bay and human excrement from the open sewers. The city literary stinks of death and decay. And this smell becomes more intense the closer one goes to the old slave quarter, located right next to the marshes—which is exactly where Dr. Urbino must go after identifying his friend’s body, in search of the mysterious woman Jeremiah mentioned in his letter to him:
“As they passed by the marshes, Dr. Urbino recognized their oppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases, which on so many insomniac dawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jasmine from the patio, and which he felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life. But that pestilence so frequently idealized by nostalgia became an unbearable reality when the carriage began to lurch through the quagmire of the streets where buzzards fought over the slaughterhouse offal as it was swept along by the receding tide.”
The old slave quarter
This part of town is not only overcome by the stench of decay but also characterised by a sense of disorder: a life swayed by primitive urges, chaos, and general abandon. On Saturdays “the poor mulattoes” left their “hovels of cardboard” and “took over the rocky beaches of the colonial district” and during the weekend they surrendered to drinking, dancing and making “wild love among the icaco plants” until their own parties dissolved into bloody fights (p. 17). From Monday to Friday, “the same impetuous mob swarmed into the plazas and alleys of the old neighbourhoods” with their goods for sale and “infused the dead city with the frenzy of a human fair reeking of fried fish” (p. 17, my italics).
Dr. Urbino’s polished upper-class attire and fancy carriage seems out of place in this whole part of town with the sordid taverns, the zinc-roof houses, the gangs of ragged children and the open sewers. In fact, his decision to venture into the slave quarters “was so foreign to his usual habits” that his coachman had to stop and confirm that he had not heard him wrong before moving on (p. 11). Despite his alleged “maniacal love for the city” and his “knowledge of it superior to anyone’s (p. 12), we are told that there had been very few times in his life when he had any reason to visit this part of the city, aptly described later as a “death trap of the poor” (p. 16). After all, Dr. Urbino was “an expensive and exclusive doctor,” which means that all his patients were in the posh District of the Viceroys, where he grew up (p. 10).
Dr. Urbino
As we learn more about the doctor, it becomes obvious that he occupies a very high position in his society. Dr. Urbino is “the city’s oldest and most illustrious physician,” an “eminent teacher” who carries himself with “academic dignity” (p. 4). He orders around the police inspector like a subordinate, and moves in the same circles as the Archbishop and the Mayor. He also appears to set himself apart in every social situation: he goes around town in an old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage because of his “disdain for fashion” (p. 9); he wears his ordinary clothes at the social event of the year, where he’s a guest of honour, where “most of the men were dressed in dinner jackets with black ties” (p. 35); and he cultivates a distinctly European appearance, complete with a Pasteur beard and “genuine cologne from Farina Gegenüber” (p. 9). Everything from his appearance to his demeanour suggests an effort to mark himself clearly as distinct—and, presumably, better—from everyone else.
Dr. Urbino’s House
His house, too, seems to embody this desire to distance himself from the world around it. Located all the way across the bay, Dr. Urbino’s “spacious and cool” house stands far and above “the stagnant garbage heap of the bay” (p. 19), in the residential district of La Manga. The location of his house matters because in the social and racial geography of this world different neighbourhoods carry different social values. There is the District of the Viceroys with the masonry houses, where Urbino grew up, the slave quarters with the “hovels of cardboard and tin on the edges of the swamps” (p. 17), and the colonial city with the alleys and plazas. And then, there is the residential district of La Manga, where Urbino’s house stands “in another time,” protected from the pestilence of the marshes (p. 18).
As the narrative gradually zooms into his house, his literal and metaphorical distance from the realities of his city becomes more obvious. The house at first sight projects European refinement. The terrace has a portico with Doric columns, and the reception rooms are furnished with “original English pieces from the late nineteenth century,” crystal chandeliers, Sèvres vases and statues of pagan idylls (p. 18). There is a small music room for concerts, a stand with records “arranged with care” and a piano that had not been played for years.
The library
A bit further in, we move into Urbino’s most private and enclosed space, his library, which, we’re told, was his sanctuary “until old age carried him off” (p. 10). Inside, English furniture dominates the room, including his father’s walnut desk and tufted leather chairs. These pieces evoke conservative dignity and respectability, reflecting Urbino’s flair for European sophistication. But the library also reveals something more personal: his almost obsessive need for order, visual consistency and systematisation. Lining the walls (and the windows) are shelfs with glass doors, displaying “in an almost demented order” three thousand books, all “bound in identical calfskin with his initials in gold on the spines” (p. 19).
This room is under his absolute control. It is his own little world, where everything has its proper place and nothing is out of alignment. Also, this is the one room that is physically protected from outside intrusions. While the other rooms of the house were “at the mercy of noise and foul winds from the port”, the library “always enjoyed the tranquillity and fragrance of an abbey” (p. 19). I particularly like the connotations of this comparison: an abbey is a self-contained institution, enclosed and removed from society, operating according to its own rules and rhythms, with a regimented life largely insulated from outside influences. And that’s why the library is Urbino’s sanctuary: a space completely under his control, safe from all foreign intrusions—smells, noises and disorder.
Distinctions collapse
However, outside this “sanctuary”— Urbino’s private illusion of order and control—the oppressive realities of the outside world cannot be escaped. The portico with the Doric columns is not looking out onto some quaint European landscape but the “still, miasmic water and the debris from sunken ships in the bay” (p. 18): the classical architectural ideal is literally situated over the polluted Caribbean environment with reminders of its colonial past—the shipwrecked galleon and the corpse of its commander— still floating in the waters. Also, despite the distance from the bay, smells like the exhaust fumes of the motors still “fluttered through the house on hot afternoons like an angel condemned to putrefaction” (p. 9).
On a more symbolic level, the house cannot even sustain a pure European cultural
identity. Beyond the reception rooms, which are carefully furnished with 19th century English pieces, the “European coherence vanished,” as wicker armchairs were jumbled together with Viennese rockers and leather footstools made by local craftsmen” (p. 18). For all its isolation, Urbino’s house is embedded in the Caribbean landscape and culture, and exposed to the stench of decay that permeates the entire city.
Gradually it becomes obvious that this decay is not just physical. It is not just the open sewers, the animal carcasses and the piles of garbage that pollute the city: the city is rotten at its foundations. Its apparent grandeur is rooted in the slave trade under Spanish colonial rule, a history which created and continues to sustain the existing social hierarchy. The city flourished in the 18th century, but these “years of glory” were built on its role as the “largest African slave market in the Americas” (p.18).
Yet, the independence from Spain and the abolition of slavery brought about its inevitable decline. Eventually, “the great old families sank into their ruined palaces” and weeds started growing in “opened cracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions” (p. 17). The city became a ghost of its former glory, “an illusion of memory,” a place “where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps.” And it is in these “conditions of honourable decadence” that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been born and raised (p. 16, 17).
In this context, Dr. Urbino’s visit to the old slave quarter, with its overwhelming smell of pestilence, takes on a new significance. Let’s look at the passage again, paying particular attention to the emphasised words and phrases:
As they passed by the marshes, Dr. Urbino recognized their oppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases, which on so many insomniac dawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jasmine from the patio, and which he felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life. But that pestilence so frequently idealized by nostalgia became an unbearable reality when the carriage began to lurch through the quagmire of the streets where buzzards fought over the slaughterhouse offal as it was swept along by the receding tide (p. 12)
On a symbolic level, the suffocating gases and pestilence coming from the direction of the old slave quarter, where the signs of slavery are still literally visible on the older slaves’ chests, can be read as a constant reminder of the city’s shameful colonial past. Time and distance may dull the intensity of its magnitude, but they cannot erase its persistent, nagging presence. For Urbino, the suffocating gases feel “like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life,” a pestilence softened by “the fragrance of jasmine” and further idealized by nostalgia (p. 12).
His physical and social distance from the old slave quarter allows him to sustain this illusion, which finds its ultimate expression in his library, a space seemingly safe from the ugly realities of the present. However, reality cannot be avoided forever and the illusion inevitably breaks. When Urbino finds himself in the public market the pestilence becomes “an unbearable reality” (p. 12). The slave quarter is not the source of decay; it is its symptom. It is a reminder of an inescapable past, one that collective memory has reshaped to fit its narrative of historical glory.
Urbino’s return from Paris
This contrast between illusion and reality, as well as the power of memory to alter the past, become even more explicit in the description of Urbino’s return home after his long stay in Europe. As soon as the city he had idealised during his stay in Paris appears on the horizon, with the “buzzards on the roofs” and “the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies,” Urbino realises that “he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia” (p. 106). Greeted by a blanket of animal carcasses floating in the water, the young doctor does his best to “hide the lump in his throat” caused by sadness and disillusionment (p. 106).
The journey from the port to the family home in the family carriage mirrors his visit to the old slave quarter. On the journey from the port to the District of the Viceroys, the “unmerciful reality” of his city “[comes] pouring in through the window” of the closed carriage. The nostalgic image of his city collapses before his eyes and “he [finds] nothing that seems worthy of his nostalgia.” Unable to “discern the ardent scent of jasmine behind the vapours of death from the open sewers” he turns his head from his mother” and “crie[s] in silence in the carriage (p. 106, 107).
However, as Urbino settles back into life in his city, with his family, old friends, and “the covetous attentions of the unmarried women of his class” (p. 107-8) it appears that there’s little that time and habit cannot mitigate. Gradually he gets used to “the sultry heat of October, to the excessive odors” and the prevailing attitude of postponement and inactivity until “at last he gave in to the spell of habit.”
His justification for this surrender points to something beyond his own personal adaptation, revealing a broader attitude of social resignation: “This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it” (p. 108). What originally appears unbearable becomes ordinary; what nostalgia cannot soften, habit eventually normalizes. And perhaps this is the most unsettling aspect of all: the city does not need to address the sins of its past. It only needs to become accustomed to its smell.
“the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past” (p. 106).
And perhaps this is where the image of jasmine and pestilence takes us beyond Urbino himself. As the narrator observes, “the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past” (p. 106). On an individual level, idealising the past can help us move on with our lives and makes our reality easier to bear. However, when this happens collectively, something more dangerous can happen. The pestilence becomes a familiar part of the background, while the scent of jasmine rises up with it, altering our perception of its intensity and proportions, and luring us to a comfortable state of complacency, in which we no longer feel the need to confront the wrongs of the past.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this! How do you interpret the theme of decay in the story and its connection to the city’s colonial past? There is so much more to explore on this theme, and I can’t wait to see how the narrative develops this theme as the story unfolds.
Until next time,
Happy readings!
—Aristi
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