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“Arcade of the Scribes” is one of the fictional districts in the Colombian city where the sweeping love story in “Love in the Time of Cholera,” by Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, takes place. The novel chronicles more than a half-century of love, beginning with the young Fermina Daza and her unspoken passion for Florentino Ariza. The two follow each other’s eyes and hidden letters for years, until Fermina’s father, upon finding out, forces her to leave the city. The letters continue to find her, though, as does Florentino’s love for her. When the two see each other again after years apart they meet in the Arcade of Scribes, alone amidst the swirling throngs in the plaza, he spots her and approaches with the courage of pure, un-jaded love: Behind her, so close to her ear that only she could hear it in the tumult, she heard his voice:
“This is not the place for a crowned goddess…
”
, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor. ...
"They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by everyone's shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon."
