Pius V Loayza Steamship

The Pius V Loayza is one of the River Company of the Caribbean’s three identical vessels, named for the company’s founder. More than a means of transport, it becomes the setting for Florentino Ariza’s first journey away from Fermina Daza’s city and for his reversal of that departure: he takes the same boat back after deciding that a telegraph career cannot outweigh his attachment to home. Its changing river conditions, shared sleeping arrangements, and encounters among passengers make the voyage a trial of both body and feeling.

Design and accommodation

The boat is a two-story wooden house built on a broad, level iron hull. Its maximum draft of five feet allows it to negotiate variable water depths. The company’s older vessels were built in Cincinnati in the mid-nineteenth century, modeled on boats that traveled the Ohio and Mississippi, and propelled by wood-fired boilers and paddle wheels on either side. This vessel instead has a single enormous wheel at the stern, with horizontal paddles turning beneath the passenger deck.

The decks divide work and social life. The lower deck contains the steam engines, galleys, and crew sleeping quarters, where hammocks hang at different heights. The upper deck holds the bridge, officers’ cabins, and a recreation and dining room where notable passengers are invited to dinner and cards. Between them, the middle deck has six first-class cabins on each side of a passage used as a common dining room. At the prow, an open sitting room with carved railings and iron columns faces the river; passengers commonly hang their hammocks there at night. The arrangement offers formal cabins alongside makeshift sleeping spaces, but the river journey tests the comfort suggested by the boat’s passenger decks.

Florentino’s departure and first days aboard

Florentino boards on a Sunday in July at seven in the morning, carrying a tin trunk with his clothes for the mountain wastelands, illustrated novels he has bound himself, and well-read volumes of love poetry. He has left his violin behind because he associates it with his misfortune. At his mother’s insistence, however, he brings a practical bedroll containing a pillow, sheet, small pewter chamber pot, and mosquito netting, wrapped in straw matting and tied with hemp ropes for hanging as a hammock. He expects not to need it in a cabin with a bed and linens; before long, the shared conditions aboard prove his mother’s foresight.

An unexpected arrival changes his accommodation. A newly appointed English plenipotentiary, traveling with his wife, daughter, liveried servant, and seven bulky trunks, boards with the Provincial Governor. The Captain—a giant from Curaçao—appeals to passengers’ patriotism, citing Britain’s decisive support in the struggle for independence from Spanish rule and asking them to make the distinguished family comfortable. Florentino gives up his cabin. The decision reflects the boat’s social hierarchy in action: a passenger’s place can be yielded to accommodate an official and his family, while Florentino must adapt to common quarters.

At first the river is high, and for two nights the boat moves without difficulty. After dinner, at five, the crew distributes folding canvas cots. Passengers make beds where space permits, using linens from their own bedrolls and mosquito netting; hammock owners sleep in the salon, while people without bedding sleep on dining tables under tablecloths that are changed only twice during the trip. Florentino is awake for much of the night, hearing Fermina in the river breeze and the boat’s movement, and imagining her presence as a companion to his solitude. At dawn, the empty pastureland and misty swamps seem to give him the strength to endure forgetting.

His awareness of the boat comes gradually. He has not explored it on boarding, as first-time travelers commonly do. At dusk, passing the hamlet of Calamar, he goes to the stern and sees the great wheel turning beneath the toilet opening, throwing up foam and steam. The mundane act of discovering the mechanism underfoot makes the vessel’s scale and operation suddenly tangible to a passenger who has never traveled before.

Hardship, routine, and an encounter

After three days of favorable water, sandbanks and rapids make navigation harder. The river grows muddy and narrower, winding through dense jungle; occasional straw huts stand beside wood piles for the boilers. At night the boat must anchor. Heat, mosquitoes, and the smell of salted meat drying on the railings drive many passengers—especially Europeans—out of their cabins and onto the decks. These details turn the boat from an imagined route to a demanding, crowded environment, where even sleep is improvised.

Florentino’s private routines give the nights another shape. In the dining room, beneath the carbide lamp kept burning until dawn, he rereads illustrated novels whose plots he knows almost by heart, recasting their protagonists as people from his own life and assigning himself and Fermina the roles of lovers kept apart by fate. On other nights he writes anguished letters and scatters their fragments over the moving water. The boat carries these acts of remembrance alongside its passengers: its motion does not free him from Fermina, but continually gives his longing new forms.

One night, while walking toward the toilets after reading, Florentino is pulled into a cabin by a woman he cannot identify in the darkness. The encounter is brief, and the woman tells him to forget it and that it never happened. Its effect persists beyond the cabin: he recognizes the possibility that his idealized love for Fermina might be displaced by an earthly passion, then tries to discover the woman’s identity without success. The boat thus becomes the setting not only for remembering and imagined fidelity but for an experience that unsettles his belief that his emotional life has only one possible object.

Return voyage and significance

While aboard, Florentino is consumed by thoughts of Fermina’s wedding. A fever brought on by the intensity of his imagined ordeal causes the Captain to fear cholera; the ship’s doctor sends him to the quarantine cabin with bromides. By the following day, after the boat has sighted the cliffs of Caracolí, the fever has passed. In the sedation, Florentino has decided that he does not care about the telegraph’s promised future and will return to his old Street of Windows.

The Captain tries to change his mind, arguing that the telegraph is the science of the future and that a system is already being devised to install it on boats. Florentino resists. The Captain arranges his return passage in exchange for the cabin he had surrendered to the English representative, and takes him home, also knowing of his useful connections to the River Company of the Caribbean. The outward journey has brought Florentino toward a new post; the return is a deliberate refusal of that future.

The downriver trip takes less than six days. Florentino feels at home again when the boat enters Mercedes Lagoon at dawn and he sees fishing-canoe lights wavering in its wake. It docks in Niño Perdido Cove, the last port for riverboats until the old Spanish channel is dredged and restored. Rather than wait until six in the morning for hired sloops, he departs earlier on the mail sloop, whose crew treats him as one of their own. Before leaving the boat, he throws his bedroll into the water and watches it drift beyond the lagoon toward the ocean, convinced he will not need it again because he will never leave Fermina’s city. The discarded bedroll reverses its earlier meaning: what his mother had packed to help him endure travel is no longer necessary once he has chosen to remain. The Pius V Loayza’s defining role in his story is therefore double: it carries him away, but its return passage brings him back to the place to which he binds his future.