Fermina Daza and Aunt Escolástica’s relationship

Fermina Daza and Aunt Escolástica’s relationship is at once familial, maternal, and conspiratorial: the aunt raises Fermina after her mother’s death, offers her refuge from an emotionally barren household, and helps her pursue her first love in secret. That support carries a severe cost. When Lorenzo Daza discovers the correspondence, he sends Escolástica away; Fermina’s desperate response shows that the aunt is not a secondary presence in her life but one of the people who made love, trust, and resistance imaginable to her.

A maternal bond within Lorenzo Daza’s household

Escolástica is Lorenzo Daza’s unmarried sister, but her place in Fermina’s life exceeds that of a conventional aunt. She has raised the only child of her brother’s loveless marriage since the death of Fermina’s mother, and Fermina identifies her with the mother she can barely remember. Her care is expressed through daily closeness: when Florentino Ariza first sees Fermina, she is giving Escolástica a reading lesson, the older woman and girl sitting together over a book. The scene initially looks like a daughter teaching her mother; its mistaken appearance points toward the real intimacy between them.

Their household offers little emotional security beyond this attachment. Lorenzo is a commanding father, while Escolástica’s dependence on his charity leaves her vulnerable to his authority. She nevertheless behaves toward him more as Fermina’s accomplice than as his compliant sister. The contrast defines the bond: Escolástica is not simply affectionate but makes herself a source of understanding and practical shelter within a family governed by the father’s power.

The aunt as confidante and accomplice

When Escolástica recognizes Florentino’s repeated appearances near Fermina, she interprets them as signs of love and encourages her niece to consider what his reserve might mean. Fermina initially feels pity for the thin, timid young man, imagining that he is sick; Escolástica suggests that he may instead be sick with love. The aunt’s instinctive interest turns the repeated sightings into an intimate diversion for both women. As they cross the Park of the Evangels, they take quick glances at Florentino and suppress their laughter, sharing a private understanding that Fermina’s father does not possess.

Escolástica gives this understanding a practical form. She teaches Fermina sign language as a way to communicate in a forbidden romance and predicts that a serious suitor will eventually bring her a letter. When Fermina’s curiosity develops into anxious longing, the aunt’s encouragement has already made the possibility of a message part of her hopes. At Christmas Eve Mass, Fermina senses Florentino in the crowd and turns to see him; when she grips Escolástica’s arm in distress, her aunt answers with an imperceptible sign of unconditional complicity. Their loyalty is communicated not through a public declaration but through a gesture that leaves the father unaware.

After Fermina and Florentino begin exchanging letters, Escolástica helps carry a message to the telegraph office and permits the correspondence to proceed through apparently casual encounters. For the first three months, the young couple write every day, at times twice a day, though they never speak alone. Escolástica understands that the relationship has become more than a passing girlish fancy, and that continued involvement could put her own position in the household at risk: she has no independent support, and Lorenzo would regard her assistance as a betrayal. Her loyalty therefore develops into a conflict between dependence on her brother and care for the niece she has raised.

She does not abruptly end the romance. Instead, she allows Fermina to use a method that gives both the appearance of innocence: the girls leave letters in hiding places along Fermina’s route between home and the Academy, then indicate where replies can be found. Baptisteries, holes in trees, and cracks in ruined colonial fortresses become intermediaries, while rain, mud, damage, and lost messages repeatedly threaten the exchange. The aunt’s participation makes the correspondence possible without requiring her to oversee every delivery, but the accumulated risk eventually frightens her. Her help is thus neither casual approval nor untroubled support; it is a sustained act of complicity under the pressure of family authority.

Discovery, expulsion, and separation

The correspondence is exposed when Sister Franca de la Luz discovers Fermina writing a love letter in class. Fermina admits the offense but refuses to identify her sweetheart, and the Academy confirms her expulsion. Lorenzo then searches her room and finds three years of letters hidden in the false bottom of her trunk. Convinced that only his sister could have enabled such a relationship, he punishes Escolástica without granting her an excuse or appeal.

Lorenzo sends her away to San Juan de la Ciénaga. Fermina’s last memory of the parting is of her aunt in her brown habit, ill and leaving through the drizzle with little more than her sleeping mat and a month’s money wrapped in a handkerchief. The smallness of what Escolástica can carry contrasts with the magnitude of what she has provided: care, confidence, and the means for Fermina to form a life beyond her father’s control. The expulsion destroys their everyday alliance at the very moment Lorenzo has discovered how central it is.

Fermina’s response makes the rupture unmistakable. She shuts herself in her room and refuses food and drink; when her father finally persuades her to open the door, she is changed by grief and anger. Lorenzo tries to make her treat the affair as a youthful illusion and return to the Academy, but the loss of Escolástica is inseparable from the punishment of her love. When he presses her to comply, Fermina threatens herself with a meat knife, compelling him to retreat from the confrontation. Her resistance is not merely a defense of Florentino; it is also a protest against the unjust removal of the person she has always associated with her dead mother.

Long absence and the meaning of the bond

After she escapes her father’s authority, Fermina searches for Escolástica across the Caribbean provinces, asking people who might know where she has gone. She finds no trace of her for nearly thirty years. Only then does a letter, delayed as it passes through many hands, inform her that Escolástica has died in the Water of God leprosarium. The long interval turns the aunt’s expulsion into an enduring absence rather than a temporary separation, and the belated news cannot restore the relationship that Lorenzo’s decision severed.

The bond also shapes how Fermina’s early love remains in memory. After the death of Juvenal Urbino, Florentino’s renewed declaration unsettles her, and she initially reads his presence through the hatred she believes must have grown out of her rejection of him. As she remembers the old days, the Park of the Evangels and the world around it have changed; the landscapes of first love no longer exist as she knew them. Hildebranda Sánchez later revisits that past with her, but Escolástica’s absence is already part of its emotional history: she had been the confidante who helped make the courtship possible, and the person whose punishment made its cost impossible to forget.

A relationship measured across Fermina’s life

The narrative gives the aunt’s support consequences far beyond the secret exchange of letters. Her care first answers the loneliness of a girl whose mother died young; her assistance then lets Fermina test a desire forbidden by her father and watched by the school. When Lorenzo retaliates, Fermina’s grief becomes a decisive act of resistance, and the subsequent decades of searching show that separation does not erase attachment. Escolástica remains present in Fermina’s story as an absent maternal figure whose loyalty had a price.

That history offers a counterpoint to later attempts to police Fermina’s intimate life. When her daughter Ofelia condemns the possibility of love in old age as revolting, Fermina orders her out of the house. The episode does not make the two situations identical, but it recalls the older pattern: Fermina will not accept another person’s contempt as the final authority over love. The support Escolástica once gave her in secret has become part of a life in which Fermina can defend affection openly, even when family judgment turns against it.