Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza’s relationship

Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza’s relationship is a love that begins in secret correspondence, is broken by family pressure and separation, and persists in Florentino’s memory across more than half a century. Its decisive pattern is not uninterrupted union but return: a first glance becomes an exchange of letters and a promise of marriage, while, after Fermina’s husband dies, Florentino again declares his love and Fermina is left to face grief, solitude, and the unexpected persistence of their shared past.

First encounter and the opening of a secret

Florentino first sees Fermina when he delivers a telegram to her father, Lorenzo Daza. Passing a sewing room, he notices a girl studying a reading lesson with her aunt, Escolástica, who has raised her as her own. Fermina’s casual glance through the window begins what the novel describes as a cataclysm of love that will still be unfolding half a century later. The relationship thus starts not with a conversation or an acknowledged courtship, but with a brief look witnessed during an ordinary errand.

Florentino later sees Fermina and Escolástica taking their reading lesson beneath the almond trees outside their house. He returns to the park where he can watch, and Fermina’s indifference does not tell him whether she has noticed him. When Escolástica leaves Fermina alone in the doorway one afternoon, Florentino crosses the street and asks her to accept a letter. Fermina says she cannot take one without her father’s permission. Florentino urges her to obtain that permission, presenting the letter as a matter of life and death. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting his request, Fermina gives him a way to return: he is to come each afternoon and wait until she changes seats.

That small signal establishes the relationship’s early grammar: approach, concealment, and written communication in place of private conversation. Florentino returns with a white camellia in his lapel, and Fermina asks for the letter. The exchange creates an opening without dissolving the constraints around them; their courtship must develop through indirect gestures and messages, not unobserved meetings.

Correspondence, commitment, and separation

The first answer reaches Florentino through Escolástica. She goes to the telegraph office and leaves a breviary behind; inside it is Fermina’s envelope. Florentino reads the note repeatedly and celebrates with such abandon that his mother has to make him take castor oil. The episode makes the letter more than a practical means of communication: its arrival becomes an event capable of overwhelming him, while its secrecy depends on the cooperation of Fermina’s aunt.

For a time the two write to each other every day, sometimes twice in one day. They think, dream, and wait for one another through the correspondence, yet they do not get the chance to speak alone about their love. Escolástica first helps carry the letters in encounters that appear accidental. When the intensity of the exchange becomes clear to her, she fears both the consequences of betraying her brother and the harm of denying Fermina the possibility of love. She permits the young couple to exchange letters by hiding them along Fermina’s daily route between home and school. Baptisteries, holes in trees, and gaps in ruined fortifications become temporary repositories for a relationship that cannot safely take place in the open. Rain, mud, and mishaps sometimes damage or lose the messages, but the two find ways to resume their exchange.

Their correspondence also entails risks beyond secrecy within the household. During the civil conflict, Florentino is accused of spying because he is suspected of sending messages in the musical key of G to Liberal ships. He spends three nights in the local garrison with irons around his ankles. Even much later, he remembers the short captivity as something endured for love, although the immediate cause was the suspicion that his messages served the war rather than his courtship.

After nearly two years of correspondence, Florentino makes a formal marriage proposal in a one-paragraph letter. For the preceding six months he has sent Fermina a white camellia; she returns it in her next letter, accepting the continuation of their exchange but not treating the flower as a commitment. The formal proposal changes the meaning of the game. Fermina is frightened and asks Escolástica for advice. Her aunt tells her to accept, even if fear or later regret follows. Fermina nevertheless takes months to decide. When Florentino sends another camellia with a notice that it is the last, Fermina answers on a strip torn from the margin of a school notebook: she will marry him if he promises not to make her eat eggplant. Florentino is unprepared for her acceptance, but his mother has already begun arranging to rent more of their house in anticipation of the marriage.

That promise is not the start of a settled life together. Lorenzo Daza takes Fermina away on a journey intended to make her forget Florentino. Before leaving, Fermina writes Florentino a brief farewell on a sheet torn from a pack of toilet paper and sends him her severed braid in a velvet box embroidered with gold thread. The braid and letter turn a forced departure into a final act of communication: she cannot remain with him, but she leaves him a tangible sign of what the separation is taking away. The journey begins with an eleven-day mule caravan along the ridges of the Sierra Nevada, setting physical distance against the intimate, hidden world the letters had made between them.

The long interval and the return of the past

The separation does not erase the relationship from Florentino’s life. After Fermina rejects him, he continues to think of her; he has no need to mark each passing day, because something continually reminds him of her. When he later stands in the deserted drawing room at Fermina’s husband’s wake, he says he has waited more than half a century for the opportunity to repeat his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love. His declaration gives the early courtship a retrospective shape: the promise that began through letters has become, for him, a lifelong claim maintained in the absence of a shared life.

For Fermina, the declaration arrives at a moment when she is still in the first hours of widowhood. She is initially pleased to see Florentino, whom she feels she has erased from her life and can now see clearly, purified by forgetfulness. But his vow strikes her as a violation of the mourning household while her husband’s body is still warm in the grave. She orders Florentino out and tells him not to return during the years he has left. The scene brings their divergent experiences into sharp focus: Florentino treats the moment as the long-awaited renewal of his vow, while Fermina experiences it first as an intrusion into grief.

Grief, memory, and the relationship’s unresolved ending

After Florentino leaves, Fermina locks the door herself and confronts her future alone. She recognizes the weight of the drama begun when she was not yet eighteen, a past she had not fully understood until now. Her grief is bound to domestic details: her husband’s slippers and pajamas, his absence in the mirror, and the sense of his presence on her skin. In the empty bedroom she thinks that the people one loves should take all their things with them when they die. The loss is not an abstraction; it has altered the familiar objects and spaces of her marriage.

Fermina goes to bed fully dressed and alone on her usual side, aware in sleep that half the bed is empty and that she misses the weight of the other body. She sobs without changing position. When morning comes, she realizes she survived the night she had hoped would bring her death, and that while sleeping she thought more about Florentino than about her dead husband. This does not undo her rejection or settle what she feels for either man. Instead, the ending leaves the relationship newly present inside her mourning: Florentino’s declaration has reopened a past she believed erased, and her grief has exposed a feeling she did not expect to find there.