Fermina expels Ofelia from her house

Fermina expels Ofelia from her house when Ofelia tries to end her renewed visits with Florentino Ariza by condemning them as immoral. The confrontation makes a family dispute over reputation into a sharper struggle over who may govern a widow’s private life: Fermina refuses to let her daughter’s prejudice dictate whom she receives, and banishes her rather than abandon the companionship that has helped restore her spirit.

The Visits and Ofelia’s Alarm

Dr. Urbino Daza welcomes the resumption of Florentino’s visits because they encourage his mother. Ofelia, however, arrives from New Orleans on the first fruit boat after hearing that Fermina has formed an unusual friendship with a man whose moral reputation she distrusts. During her first week at home, she becomes increasingly alarmed by Florentino’s ease in entering the house and by the whispers and lovers’ quarrels that continue late into the night.

The siblings interpret the same visits in opposite ways. For Dr. Urbino Daza, they express a healthy affection between two lonely old people. Ofelia sees secret concubinage, a vice that threatens the family’s good name. She cannot imagine an innocent friendship between a man and a woman, least of all when they are eighty. In an argument with her brother, she claims that Florentino need only climb into their mother’s widow’s bed to complete his consolation of her. His wife answers calmly in defense of love at any age, but Ofelia loses her temper.

Ofelia’s judgment is shaped by prejudice as much as by concern for her mother. The narrative compares her disposition to that of Doña Blanca, her paternal grandmother: both are distinguished and arrogant, and both live at the mercy of their prejudices. Ofelia’s objections therefore do more than question Florentino’s character. They make old age itself a reason to deny the possibility of a legitimate, innocent attachment.

Fermina’s Answer

Ofelia gives her condemnation its bluntest form: “Love is ridiculous at our age,” she shouts, “but at theirs it is revolting.” Her words reach Fermina, who summons her daughter to the bedroom, the place she uses when she wants to speak without the servants hearing. She asks Ofelia to repeat the accusations. Ofelia does not soften them: she describes Florentino as a known pervert and calls his relationship with Fermina equivocal, arguing that it damages the family’s reputation more than Lorenzo Daza’s villainies or Juvenal Urbino’s ingenuous adventures.

Fermina listens without speaking or even blinking. But once the accusations are finished, she is transformed: she has come back to life. The sequence gives the insult an unexpected consequence. Instead of persuading Fermina to retreat from Florentino, Ofelia’s contempt makes Fermina recover the force to defend both her affection and her authority over her own home.

Fermina tells Ofelia that the only thing holding her back is the lack of strength to beat her for her insolence and ill intent. Then she orders her to leave immediately and swears on her mother’s grave that Ofelia will never set foot in the house again while Fermina lives. The curse-like solemnity of the oath makes the expulsion more than an angry threat: Fermina binds herself to it with the last thing she still regards as pure.

Exile and the Limits of Reconciliation

No one can persuade Fermina to reverse her decision. Ofelia moves to her brother’s house and sends petitions through distinguished emissaries, but neither her son’s mediation nor her friends’ intervention changes Fermina’s mind. The banishment holds even after the immediate quarrel has passed; family influence cannot undo the boundary Fermina has set.

Fermina eventually confides in her daughter-in-law, with whom she has maintained a certain plebeian camaraderie. A century earlier, she says, life had frustrated her and Florentino because they were too young; now, she adds, others want to do the same because they are too old. She lights a cigarette with the end of the one already in her hand, then gives voice to the anger consuming her. The gesture accompanies her refusal to let age become a second prohibition after youth had once stood in the way.

Ofelia returns to New Orleans after exhausting her options. Her mother agrees, after much pleading, to say goodbye, but refuses to let her into the house. Fermina keeps her oath even at the cost of this final act of estrangement. The ending is therefore not a reconciliation: it is a narrow farewell governed by the boundary Fermina has chosen to maintain.

Widowhood, Love, and Self-Determination

Fermina’s quarrel with Ofelia belongs to a broader choice about her life after Juvenal Urbino’s death. The dispute is not simply whether Florentino is respectable or whether the visits look proper to outsiders. It is whether a widowed woman must accept her family’s authority over her companionship. Fermina gives the answer in her own terms: if widows possess any advantage, she says, it is that no one is left to give them orders.

That claim does not erase the force of social judgment. Ofelia invokes sexual propriety, public reputation, and age, while Fermina’s response makes plain how easily those standards can become commands over a woman’s private life. By expelling her daughter, Fermina chooses a painful family rupture over surrendering her relationship to Florentino. The episode turns the house into the contested ground on which her late-life autonomy is asserted—and shows that her renewed vitality is bound not only to receiving love, but to defending her right to choose it.