Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza’s first courtship is a secret love affair begun by a glance and sustained through letters, a bond so consuming that it becomes a measure of the time and distance separating them. Its intimacy grows without private conversation: messages take the place of speech, while family authority and social convention eventually break the young couple’s daily contact without erasing its hold on their lives.

Identity and First Encounter

The courtship begins when Florentino, working as a telegraph messenger, passes a sewing room in Lorenzo Daza’s house. He sees a young girl reading with an older woman and mistakes her for the woman’s daughter; in fact, the woman is Fermina’s aunt, Escolástica, who has raised her as her own. Fermina glances up at the passing messenger. The narrator identifies that casual look as the beginning of a love that has not ended even half a century later.

At the time, Fermina is thirteen and attending the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin. Florentino lives with his mother, Tránsito Ariza, on the Street of Windows. He is the only child of Don Pius V Loayza, a prominent shipowner who supported him privately but never legally acknowledged him. After Don Pius’s death, Florentino left school and began work at the Postal Agency, where his good sense attracted the attention of the telegraph operator. The two young people meet across a sharp difference in family standing and circumstance, but the first recognition is rendered not as a negotiation between them: it is the force of Fermina’s glance and Florentino’s lasting fixation.

Florentino’s attachment becomes especially visible when he watches Fermina and Escolástica repeating their reading lesson beneath the almond trees outside the house. During the vacation, he learns that they appear there every afternoon. Fermina does not visibly encourage or reject him; he reads her indifference as a radiance that allows him to hope. When Escolástica leaves Fermina alone in the doorway one afternoon, Florentino crosses the street and asks permission to send her a letter. That carefully limited request opens the way for a relationship that will be conducted primarily through writing.

Letters, Ritual, and Secrecy

Fermina tells Florentino to return each afternoon and wait until she changes seats. He understands the signal on the following Monday: when Escolástica goes inside, Fermina rises and sits in the other chair. Wearing a white camellia in his lapel, he crosses the street; Fermina, still not looking directly at him, checks that the street is deserted and asks for the letter. The exchange establishes the courtship’s characteristic form. A change of seat, a flower, an empty street, and a letter carry meanings the young lovers cannot safely express in conversation.

Florentino’s anticipation finds an outlet in repetition. On the last Friday in February, three days before school reopens, Escolástica visits the telegraph office to ask about sending a telegram to Piedras de Moler, a village not on the office’s service list. She pretends to forget a lizard-skin breviary at the counter. Inside is Fermina’s reply, enclosed in linen paper decorated with golden vignettes. Florentino spends the afternoon reading it again and again and eating roses until his mother has to hold his head and make him swallow castor oil. The episode joins the written message to the bodily excess of his love: a brief note becomes an event he consumes, rereads, and cannot contain.

The couple’s first year is described as a period in which neither can do anything except think of the other, dream of the other, and wait for letters. They write every day for the first three months, sometimes twice a day. Yet they do not get an opportunity to speak alone or discuss their love, either in that spring or the following year. Their relationship is therefore intense but mediated: its daily closeness depends on correspondence, while face-to-face intimacy remains out of reach.

Escolástica makes that correspondence possible. After carrying the first letter to the telegraph office, she allows messages to pass in encounters that appear casual, though she does not permit even a brief conversation. She initially treats the affair as a girlish fancy; after three months, she understands that it is serious and fears that its discovery could cost her the support she receives from her brother. Lorenzo is tyrannical, and she knows he would not forgive her betrayal of his confidence. Even so, she cannot bring herself to inflict on Fermina the grief she herself has had to endure. She allows the girl to hide letters along her daily route from home to the Academy and to indicate where Florentino should leave his reply. Their messages move through baptisteries, tree hollows, and cracks in ruined colonial fortresses. Rain, mud, damage, and loss sometimes interrupt the exchange, but the lovers find ways to resume it.

Discovery and Separation

The private system collapses after Sister Franca de la Luz, superior of the Academy, catches Fermina writing a love letter instead of taking notes during a lesson on cosmogony. The school’s rules make the offense grounds for expulsion. Fermina admits that she wrote the letter but refuses to identify her sweetheart, and she maintains that refusal before the religious tribunal. The verdict is confirmed. Lorenzo then searches his daughter’s room, which had previously been inviolate, and discovers packets containing three years’ worth of letters hidden in a false bottom of her trunk. Their signature identifies Florentino, though Lorenzo cannot believe that Fermina knows so little about him beyond his work as a telegraph operator and his love of the violin.

Lorenzo assumes his sister must have helped the lovers and gives Escolástica neither an excuse nor an appeal. He sends her away by schooner to San Juan de la Ciénaga. Fermina’s remembered farewell is an austere scene: her aunt, feverish inside her brown habit, disappears through the drizzle carrying her sleeping mat and a month’s money wrapped in a handkerchief. The expulsion of the aunt is thus more than punishment for complicity. It removes the family member who had made the lovers’ correspondence possible and leaves Fermina without the intermediary who had protected her secret.

Florentino is unprepared for Lorenzo’s intervention. Four months before the date planned to formalize his engagement to Fermina, Lorenzo comes to the telegraph office and waits for him. The immediate cause lies in the letters’ discovery and Fermina’s expulsion; she has found neither the opportunity nor the means to warn Florentino. When Lorenzo takes him aside, Florentino lets himself be led, pale with fear. The confrontation turns their hidden relationship into a matter of paternal authority, while the engagement they had planned remains exposed to the force of a family regime Fermina cannot simply evade.

Afterlife of the Courtship

The courtship does not conclude emotionally when contact is broken. More than fifty-one years after Fermina rejected him, Florentino has not stopped thinking about her. He does not need to count the days: something happens every day to remind him of her. The duration of his attachment gives the youthful correspondence a double scale. At first, letters organize the impatient days of two adolescents; in retrospect, their exchange becomes the beginning of a devotion Florentino carries for decades.

The memory also returns to Fermina after Juvenal Urbino’s death. In widowhood, she initially experiences Florentino’s declaration at the wake as an impertinence and suspects a sinister plan. Her anger and effort to forget him only intensify his presence in her thoughts. At last she recalls the unreal days of the youthful love and tries to picture the little park, its shabby almond trees, and the bench associated with Florentino. The setting has changed: the trees and the old statue are gone, her former house has fallen into ruin, and the young man she remembers is difficult to reconcile with the old one who has reappeared before her. The landscape’s alteration makes memory itself part of the courtship’s afterlife: neither the original place nor the original lovers can be recovered unchanged.

Hildebranda Sánchez helps reopen that past. When the cousins meet in old age, Hildebranda brings a nearly invisible copy of their portrait as young women dressed in old-fashioned clothes. The photograph recalls the moment when Juvenal first won Fermina over, but Hildebranda also speaks of Florentino, whose fate she has long associated with her own. Fermina, who had heard reports of him over the years without imagining him as her first love in the present tense, is drawn back toward a history she had considered finished.

That return brings the old courtship into conflict with a new social prohibition. Ofelia Urbino sees the friendship between Fermina and Florentino as a disgraceful form of secret concubinage, while Dr. Urbino Daza considers it the healthy affection of two lonely old people. When Ofelia declares that love at their age is revolting, Fermina expels her from the house. The episode gives the youthful affair a changed meaning: a love once forced into secrecy by a father’s authority is now defended by Fermina against her daughter’s prejudice. The first courtship ends as an adolescent exchange of hidden letters, but its surviving memory becomes part of Fermina’s later claim to choose whom she loves and how that love may appear in public.