San Pedro Alejandrino is an old plantation that Fermina Daza visits during her journey back to the province of her youth. The estate is associated with the Liberator’s final days, but her excursion there offers no simple restoration of the past: the site’s familiar relics are shadowed by a conflicting account, while the wider journey teaches her how nostalgia can protect memory from disillusionment.

Setting and Historical Association

San Pedro Alejandrino lies nine leagues from San Juan de la Ciénaga. Fermina travels there on the yellow train, whose leisurely progress turns the short distance into an all-day journey: the engineer pauses at passengers’ requests so they can walk or bathe, and travelers get off to milk cows when hungry. The destination is therefore reached through a rural landscape and a journey governed less by speed than by the habits of its passengers.

The estate is linked to the Liberator’s death. Fermina sees the great tamarind trees where he is said to have hung his hammock and examines the bed identified as the one in which he died. Its small size surprises her: it seems inadequate not only for a man of such stature but even for an infant. The place’s historical significance is presented through tangible objects and features, yet those objects do not settle what happened.

Fermina’s Visit

Fermina has chosen to visit because she wants to see for herself whether the story about the Liberator’s small deathbed is true. The excursion forms part of a larger return to places connected with her earlier life, undertaken while she is away from her husband and seeking consolation in adolescent memories. At San Pedro Alejandrino, however, looking directly at the supposed relic does not yield the certainty she hoped for.

A fellow visitor, apparently well informed, says that the bed is a false relic and that the Liberator actually died on the floor. The contradiction unsettles the authority of the displayed object: the bed may be memorable, but the account attached to it is challenged by another version of the past. Fermina leaves depressed by what she has seen and heard since departing home.

Memory and Disillusionment

The visit changes the character of Fermina’s journey. Instead of taking pleasure in memories of her earlier trip, she begins avoiding the villages associated with nostalgia, preserving them in recollection rather than exposing them to further disappointment. When she must pass through a village, she covers her face with her mantilla so she can remember it as it once seemed to her. San Pedro Alejandrino thus stands within a return journey that repeatedly tests remembered places against their present condition and uncertain histories.

The estate’s role is not to confirm a single, settled account of the past. Its reputed deathbed and the competing claim that the Liberator died on the floor make historical memory visible as something mediated by relics and testimony. For Fermina, the visit’s decisive consequence is personal: she learns that revisiting a cherished past can erode the very memories she hoped to recover, and that sometimes preserving them requires turning away.