Did Gabriel Garcia Marquez lost his moral compass?

 For all the strengths of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera - evocation of time and place, clearly developed and distinct characters, an assured authorial narrative voice, vivid topical and psychological portraiture, a range of esoteric but lightly worn knowledge and information - toward the end of the novel there's a plot development that can only leaving me aghast and wondering: Has Garcia Marquez lost his moral compass? Up till now - 250 or so pp into this ca 350-page novel - GGM has made his central character, Florentino Araz, entirely sympathetic, a hero for whom we feel both sorrow and pity. He has vowed to devote his entire life to winning back the love of the woman who was his first love and who spurned him in an unexplained and sudden reversal of her affections. We follow FA over the course of his long bachelorhood - a life that was by no means celibate. In fact, one of the many strengths of this novel has been GGM's success at realistic but not prurient depiction of sex, and in particular his sensitivity toward women characters in general and FA's partners in particular; GGM makes clear that his love interests were usually widows and they, like him, wanted fulfilling sexual relationships but had no interest in marriage or long-term affection; everybody was happy, no one exploited. And then, as we near the climactic and long-awaited scene (which GGM provides in the first chapter and jumps back about 50 years and gives us the whole background of Florentino's pursuit of Fermia) in which Fermia is widowed, Florentino is deeply involved in a relationship w/ a 14-year-old girl who was entrusted to him as her guardian while she was enrolled in a convent high school. For all GGM's attempts to make her sympathetic and to depict this as a mutually healthy sexual relationship, it is impossible for me and I would hope for most readers to see this relationship as perverse, exploitative, and in our culture today criminal - and suddenly I find myself hating Florentino and wondering about GGM himself if he can really imagine this relationship as anything other than exploitation - and don't talk to me about Lolita, another perverse novel unaccountably adored by so many critics - and speaking of critics how many mentioned this exploitative relationship in their review of this novel back in the 80s? (And I include myself here; I know I reviewed it but have no idea if I registered any outrage at this Florentino's behavior). So mea culpa if so, and in either event how could we all let GGM off so lightly on this matter? It's still a great book in many ways, a classic even, but there's some rot at the heart of the matter.