San Juan de la Ciénaga is Fermina Daza’s birthplace and the town where she lived until adolescence. Its importance lies in the gap between the place preserved in memory and the town she finally revisits: her return offers the consolation of recovering an earlier self, but the streets, buildings, and dead bodies she encounters expose how little the present resembles the past. The town becomes both a site of personal longing and a landscape marked by historical decline and epidemic disease.

Setting and remembered past

San Juan de la Ciénaga lies roughly thirty leagues northeast of Cartagena de Indias as the crow flies. Its connection to the larger region is made vivid during the first balloon airmail flight, when Fermina Daza and Juvenal Urbino travel there as passengers on the balloon’s inaugural journey. From the air they see Cartagena de Indias, abandoned after cholera panic, and the villages and banana plantations of the Great Swamp below. Fermina’s view of the landscape stirs a childhood memory of walking through a shadowy forest with her mother, surrounded by women in muslin, white parasols, and gauze hats. The flight thus brings her birthplace into view before she can return to it on the ground, connecting the spectacle of modern travel to a private recollection that reaches back to early childhood.

The balloon reaches its destination safely, but the expedition does not give Fermina the reunion she wants. Cholera danger prevents her from visiting the town, and the party’s official business and ceremonies replace the personal encounter she had hoped for. The historic letter carried as the first mail transported through the air is delivered and then lost among other papers. Her birthplace remains beyond reach, and that thwarted visit helps give her later return its force: the journey she could not make by balloon becomes a long-deferred act of recovery.

Departure and return

During the crisis in her marriage, Fermina leaves secretly for San Juan de la Ciénaga. She sails at midnight on the regular boat, her face covered by a black mantilla, accompanied only by her fifteen-year-old goddaughter, who had been raised as a family servant. Although the children have been told that the journey is a visit to Cousin Hildebranda Sánchez’s ranch for a few months, Fermina is determined not to return. Her husband accepts the departure as punishment for his own grave sins, while both spouses soon regret their weakness. They maintain formal correspondence about their children and household affairs, but almost two years pass before either can overcome the pride obstructing a return to their shared life.

The departure is not simply an escape from marital resentment. Fermina comes to recognize that nostalgia, accumulated over years, is a deeper cause. She has traveled to Europe repeatedly after her honeymoon, but never again to San Juan de la Ciénaga after the aborted balloon visit. She regards a return to her cousin’s province as a belated form of redemption, and the thought of seeing the places of adolescence had already comforted her during her unhappiness. The town draws her not just as a refuge from her husband but as a lost country within her own life.

When Fermina arrives with her goddaughter, she summons her strength and recognizes the town despite the evidence against her memories. The Civil and Military Commander, informed of her arrival, invites her to ride in the official Victoria while a train is being prepared for San Pedro Alejandrino, which she wants to visit to see whether the bed in which the Liberator died really was as small as a child’s. The return is at once personal and historical: even as Fermina tests the truth of a national legend, she measures the altered town against the landscape of her childhood.

A town altered by time

At two in the afternoon, Fermina sees streets more like beaches, with pools covered in scum, and the mansions of the Portuguese, their coats of arms carved above the entrances and bronze jalousies at the windows. From the dim salons come the same hesitant, sad piano exercises that her recently married mother had taught the daughters of wealthy households. The plaza is deserted; no trees grow in its burning mounds of sodium nitrate. Carriages with funereal tops stand in a line, their horses asleep where they wait, and the yellow train runs toward San Pedro Alejandrino. Familiar elements survive, but they appear inside a town of heat, stillness, and abandonment.

One house in particular seems to preserve a landmark in Fermina’s mental map: the largest and most beautiful, with an arcaded passage of greenish stone, a great monastery door, and the bedroom window where Álvaro will be born many years later. Her thoughts turn to Aunt Escolástica, whom she continues to search for hopelessly in heaven and on earth. That recollection leads her, as it sometimes did when she remembered her unhappy days at the Academy, to think of Florentino Ariza in his literary clothes with his book of poems beneath the almond trees. The town’s streets therefore summon not one past but several: family, adolescence, lost affection, and the people who remain absent from the life she now inhabits.

Yet the old family house cannot be found. Where Fermina supposes it stood, she sees only a pigsty; around the corner, a street of brothels has replaced the place she expected to recognize, with prostitutes from around the world resting in doorways in case mail has arrived for them. Her conclusion is direct: it is not the same town. The return cannot restore the setting of her remembered youth. Instead, the mismatch between the remembered street and its present use makes historical change intimate, registering decline through the displacement of a family home and the alteration of the streets around it.

Cholera and the limits of recovery

Fermina covers the lower half of her face with her mantilla as the drive begins. She does not do so to avoid recognition in a place where no one could know her; she is shielding herself from the corpses lying everywhere between the railroad station and the cemetery, swollen in the sun. The commander identifies the cause as cholera. Fermina already knows: she has seen the white lumps in the mouths of the dead. She also observes that these victims do not bear the coup de grace in the back of the neck, unlike the bodies seen during the balloon expedition. The commander replies that even God improves His methods. The comparison links the epidemic on the ground to the disease-ravaged landscape glimpsed from the balloon, while the difference in the dead bodies confirms that Fermina is seeing a changed moment, not simply reliving an earlier scene.

San Juan de la Ciénaga consequently offers no simple return to a preserved home. Fermina recognizes the town through remembered sounds and landmarks, but its altered streets and the presence of cholera keep memory from becoming restoration. The place makes the distance between past and present visible: a childhood recollection can guide Fermina through the journey, yet it cannot make the town identical to the one she left. Her return recovers the meaning of her longing while showing that the object of longing has itself changed.