Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a Tallin Cruise

De'ja-vu, the strange feeling of a life moment in the past re-enacting itself in the present happened on a recent cruise to Tallin, the capital of Estonia. It seems that my fate is irreversibly linked to cruise ships, if not presidential yachts. Cruises to Tallin, Riga, Helsinki and Mariehamn from Stockholm are affordable luxuries whenever a need to get away hits the soul.

During my recent escapade to Tallin on the Queen Victoria 1 cruising ship, something remarkable happened. I don't mean having a Premium suite to myself - instead of a narrow cabin with two or four beds. On this particular cruise I met a woman, who like me was travelling alone. She was sitting by herself near a piano bar listening to a pianist's rendition of old 60s and 70s music. She was reading a book, " Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My heart skipped a beat. I was holding a copy of "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by the same author. I read her book earlier and fell in love with the tale of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza. What a strange coincidence, I thought.. to see someone reading my book and listening to piano music.

I sat on the chair opposite her and gave her a smile. Then we looked at the books we were holding, and we both laughed. We started talking. Strange though, it seemed like we knew each other from somewhere like a lost friendship hidden in the pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' novel. She said that she likes travelling alone and leisurely like on cruises after her husband passed away. I bit my lips because she took away my own story for being alone.

Obviously, our conversation fell on the books accompanying us. I told her that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is my favorite writer and that "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Hundred Years of Solitude" were to me his best works. It is a tale of a love story that makes one re-examine one's own. How great was my own love story? How long has that love lasted. We became pensive as we separately sunk into our deep memories.

Then she told me what Fermina Daza taught her about love and being a woman. That Fermina Daza the woman was lost in all the roles she played to perfection: from being a dutiful daughter to being a dutiful wife and mother. She took on the stress imposed upon her by the society she lived in. Until Florentino Ariza, having waited half-a-century for her, declared his love on the same day Fermina's husband died. As the proper lady of the house, Fermina was revolted by Florentino's audacity. But as a woman of 72 years, she was shaken by the ardour of her old suitor. Then she finally agreed to get away from her suffocating social world, and into a Carribean riverboat with Florentino. In that boat and in the face of a ravaging old age, Fermina became a woman she had not been for many, many years.

My new acquaintance had a glint in her eyes when she narrated that part of "Love in the Time of Cholera" - Fermina's discovery of her lost sexuality. I travelled deep into mine searching for what I lost in the years gone.