Eternity, Part 2
For Nadine
…And suddenly, just like that, I wanted to reread Love in the Time of Cholera. I wanted my soul to be caressed again by the fingers of those opening lines, like the dream caresses of a lover one has lost, to be lost again in that fragrant garden of long ago and far away…
I wanted to reread: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Armour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.” (Translation by Edith Grossman.)
It has become a habit of mine to drop by Bengal Boi every week when I have to go to Dhanmondi for a weekly appointment that gives me no pleasure. But the thought of visiting the bookshop afterwards gives me a something to look forward to at least. Today I picked up a new copy of Love in the Time of Cholera (My battered copy from decades ago, when I was still a virgin, is buried in some of the boxes of books that are still waiting to be opened).
At Bengal Boi, I had the pleasure of running into Bratya Raisu and we hung out for a quick second.
When we were young (there is not denying that we are both old now) he and I took a trip to Chittagong together. We stayed at the dilapidated colonial Railway Station which has since been demolished I hear. We stayed as paying guests in one of the large and bare guest rooms on the first floor with their high ceilings and old wooden doors and windows. Outside our windows, the engines and train wagons breathed and belched like live mechanical beasts. I remember it was the rainy season and the sky was grey.
Raisu was reading the Bengali translation of a book-length conversations that García Márquez had with one of his writer friends. Raisu and I used to talk about books we were both reading. Although we read the same Bengali poets, our reading in prose rarely coincided. But we would describe each book to each other in such great detail that it was as if we had both read the book in question. The book he was talking about was called The Fragrance of Guava. Years later, I read it in English translation.
García Márquez says in that book, the most difficult part of writing a novel is the first paragraph. Milan Kundera elsewhere says something similar: the first paragraph of a novel establishes the contract between the novelist and the reader. The power of the first paragraph of Love in the Time of Cholera definitely drove this point home to me. As I am rereading the novel for the third or fourth time (Borges tells us that what is important is not reading but rereading) the magic woven by the first paragraph seems to permeate the whole book.
It is not an accident of course that Cholera starts with a scenario that evokes unrequited love in the context of a suicide. The idea of suicide is never far off when it comes to unrequited love. Several years ago, I befriended an young man who was contemplating to end his life. I had desperately tried to offer him hope but at that time I had been unaware of the layer of unrequited love in his story. I failed and he quietly snuck away destroying the lives of his family and others close to him.
Recently, another young woman came to me seeking help. She too is thinking of ending her life for the same reason.
But unlike the last time I have been able to strike up a conversation with her about the ravages of unrequited love. When, in passing, I had the audacity to suggest that the unrequited lover may one day come back, this brilliant and young woman flatly told me that as wise as I was as a person that statement was simply juvenile. And she is right. It goes against all common sense, against all calculations of cost and benefit.
But my answer to her was as ridiculous as it was sincere: Yet one of the greatest stories ever written was based on that juvenile statement.
She asked me what book it was.
Love in the Time of Cholera, I told her.
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