Florentino Ariza takes a telegraph post in Villa de Leyva and returns home

Florentino Ariza takes a telegraph post in Villa de Leyva and returns home in the aftermath of Fermina Daza’s decision to marry Juvenal Urbino. The journey is meant to remove him from the city and its reminders of her; instead, his imagined wedding day, the return voyage, and a symbolic parting with his travel bundle make the trip a decisive retreat from the future planned for him. He comes back not cured of his love, but newly resolved to remain in Fermina’s city.

The appointment and departure

Fermina’s impending marriage leaves Florentino unable to speak or eat, and he spends nights weeping. His mother, Tránsito Ariza, tries to console him, then quietly seeks help from his uncle Leo XII, asking for any job that will take her son far from the city and from news of Fermina. The hope is not simply employment: distance and isolation might keep the heartbreak from being continually renewed.

Leo XII does find Florentino work, though not in a remote port on the Magdalena River as Tránsito had requested. He secures him a position as a telegraph operator in Villa de Leyva, a city more than twenty days’ journey away and almost three thousand meters above the Street of Windows. Florentino’s uncle does not act out of affection for him: Tránsito’s husband’s widow cannot bear the existence of her husband’s illegitimate son. The practical arrangement nevertheless removes Florentino from the place where his first love has become unbearable.

Florentino scarcely registers the appointment as a possible career. His recollection of this period remains filtered through misfortune, and it takes Lotario Thugut’s persuasion to make the telegraph post sound like a future rather than an exile. Lotario argues that public administration offers him a brilliant career and calls the telegraph the profession of the future. He equips Florentino for the cold: rabbit-fur-lined gloves, a hat and overcoat suited to severe winters, and other warm clothing. Leo XII supplies two serge suits and waterproof boots that had belonged to his older brother; Tránsito alters the clothes and adds wool socks and long underwear. The care invested in the preparations contrasts with Florentino’s state of mind: he makes ready as if attending to his own funeral.

A private farewell

Florentino tells no one but his mother about the journey and says goodbye to no one. His silence continues the secrecy with which he has guarded his passion, but on the eve of departure he makes one final, deliberate gesture toward Fermina. At midnight, wearing his Sunday suit, he stands alone beneath her balcony and plays the love waltz he composed for her. The melody has belonged to the two of them for three years, an emblem of their frustrated complicity, and he plays it as though the private history it carries must be put to rest before he can leave.

No one comes to the balcony or appears in the street. The waltz ends without an answer, and Florentino walks away without looking back. The scene does not announce that he has ceased to love Fermina; it marks the moment when he believes he has left her world behind. His departure is emotionally staged as an irreversible separation even before the boat leaves port.

The river journey and imagined wedding

On the riverboat, Florentino initially finds a kind of endurance in distance. The river is high and the vessel travels easily during its first nights. With little comfort available to the passengers, he remains awake, listening to the movement of the boat and finding Fermina in his thoughts. At dawn, as the day opens over pasture and swamp, he interprets the journey as proof that his mother was wise to send him away: perhaps, he thinks, he can endure forgetting.

The passage soon grows harsher. Sandbanks and rapids slow the boat; it narrows through jungle, and nights bring heat, mosquitoes, and difficult conditions for sleeping. The vessel’s precautions also reflect the civil conflict of the period. Its captain prohibits passengers from shooting alligators and later confiscates their weapons when an argument divides them into opposing camps. These details place Florentino’s private ordeal aboard a working riverboat amid the practical hazards and political tensions of the journey.

As the ship approaches Caracolí, his grief becomes organized around Fermina’s wedding. He spends the day imagining its events minute by minute, including the newlyweds’ private departure after the celebration. His imagined account is not reliable knowledge of what is actually happening: when he returns home, he recognizes that he had mistaken the time and that events were different from what he supposed. Yet the fantasy has real consequences. His distress becomes a fever, and the captain, concerned that he might have cholera, sends him to the quarantine cabin, where the ship’s doctor gives him bromides. By the next day the fever has passed, and Florentino has reached a decision: he will not pursue the telegraph career and will go back to the city.

Return and renewed attachment to the city

Florentino secures return passage by giving up the cabin he had surrendered to a representative of Queen Victoria. The captain tries to dissuade him, repeating that the telegraph is the science of the future and noting that the technology may eventually be installed on boats. Florentino refuses the argument. The captain takes him back, in part because of his connections to the River Company of the Caribbean.

The return trip takes less than six days. When the boat enters Mercedes Lagoon at dawn, Florentino already feels at home. Rather than wait for the regular sloops after the vessel docks at Niño Perdido Cove, he leaves early on the mail sloop. Before going, he throws his petate into the water and watches it drift away. The act gives physical form to his decision: he believes he will not need the travel bundle again because he will not abandon Fermina’s city for the rest of his life.

At daybreak he sees the Cathedral dome and the city’s rooftops, then locates the balcony of the palace of the Marquis de Casalduero. He imagines Fermina still asleep beside her new husband and allows the thought to hurt him rather than turning away from it. On landing, his perception of the city’s odors gives way to an awareness defined by Fermina’s presence in his mind: everything seems to carry her fragrance. The return therefore does not resolve his longing. It restores him to the place where it began and makes that attachment the principle by which he will remain.

Narrative significance

The episode reverses the expected purpose of exile. The appointment is supposed to separate Florentino from Fermina and give his life a new direction, while the river journey initially appears to confirm that he might learn to forget. Instead, distance becomes the setting in which he repeatedly imagines her, and his fever at the end of the outbound passage accompanies his refusal of the career meant to carry him away. The return is a choice made under the pressure of grief, not the result of any change in Fermina’s decision.

The two symbolic acts frame the journey: Florentino plays the shared waltz before leaving, then disposes of his petate when he comes back. The first seems to enact departure from their private past; the second declares his determination not to leave the city again. Between them, an imagined wedding becomes more powerful to him than the distant job’s promise of advancement. The episode thus gives a concrete early form to his lifelong waiting: the prospect of a future elsewhere cannot outweigh his continued attachment to Fermina and the place associated with her.