Ramona, I cannot live without you

“Ramona, I cannot live without you” is the popular song Prudencia Pitre sings when Florentino Ariza visits her at three in the morning, insisting that his reason for coming is singing rather than the comfort she suspects he seeks. The song briefly changes the encounter’s terms: Prudencia accepts his stated purpose, but the music sends him back into the night alone, where tears expose the sorrow he has swallowed for fifty-one years, nine months, and four days.

The Song as an Answer

Florentino arrives at Prudencia’s door after years without seeing her. She has already guessed that he came looking for someone to cry with, and her teasing questions leave him momentarily at a loss. He corrects her: his reasons have more to do with singing. Prudencia does not press him further. She agrees to sing, and chooses the popular song “Ramona, I cannot live without you.”

The song is not presented as a declaration that resolves Florentino’s distress. It is an act of companionship that meets his request while respecting the guarded, suggestive quality of their exchange. Prudencia sings in a very good voice; Florentino, who had approached the conversation with the possibility of being understood, does not dare to turn the moment into one of the forbidden games between them.

The Walk into Grief

After the song, Florentino leaves Prudencia’s house and walks into a city perfumed by the last dahlias of June. He reaches a street from his youth, where the shadowy widows returning from five o’clock Mass are filing past. Earlier in life, he crossed the street to avoid being seen by them; now he is the one who avoids their notice, because he can no longer hold back his tears.

The narration distinguishes these tears from the ones of a single midnight. They belong to the long accumulation of sorrow he has been swallowing for fifty-one years, nine months, and four days. The song’s title sounds like an absolute plea of dependence, but the scene does not offer Florentino the uncomplicated relief such words might promise. Instead, the singing opens onto a grief much older and larger than the visit.

From the Night to the Present

Florentino loses track of time and wakes facing a dazzling window, back in his mother’s bed. He has kept her bedroom intact and sleeps there on the few occasions when solitude troubles him. Across from the bed hangs the large mirror from Don Sancho’s Inn; when he wakes, he can see Fermina Daza reflected in its depths. The remembered song is therefore set against the rooms, objects, and habits through which his longing for Fermina persists.

The morning brings him back to the immediate present. Hearing América Vicuña playing ball in the garden with the servant girls, he realizes it is Saturday, the day the chauffeur brings her home from boarding school. He dresses carefully and takes her to the American Ice Cream Shop, where she orders her favorite enormous, multicolored glass of ice cream and he drinks black coffee. He tells her, “Today we are not going to do our things.” The change in his conduct follows the solitary night and its tears, while the song remains the small, humane encounter that precedes it.