Turn of the twentieth century

The turn of the twentieth century is presented not as a clean break with the past but as an uneven threshold: new vehicles and public technologies appear, while old habits, private desires, and historical decay persist. In the same period, Florentino Ariza’s memory of the mule-drawn trolley as a setting for secret love meets the city’s ceremony for its first balloon airmail flight, an occasion that turns the promise of progress into a question about who has actually entered the new age.

A New Century in Uneven Motion

At the turn of the century, Florentino’s ordinary journeys on a mule-drawn trolley became opportunities for clandestine courtship. He rode it four times a day between home and the office, and its abundance of freely flying little birds gave it the character of an improvised nest. Sometimes, while reading—or pretending to read—he could begin arranging a future tryst. The trolley’s open, public passage through the city made secrecy possible through brief glances rather than elaborate plans.

When his uncle, Uncle Leo XII, later provided a carriage drawn by two small gray mules with golden trappings, Florentino found that greater elegance made concealment harder. He often left it hidden at home and made his rounds on foot, careful not to leave wheel marks in the dust. The contrast turned transportation into a measure of erotic freedom: he remembered the worn, sore-covered mules of the trolley with nostalgia because a sideways glance there could reveal where love might be found. The novel’s reflection that “there is no worse enemy of secret love than a carriage waiting at the door” makes the century’s new mobility intimate as well as historical.

The Balloon and the Public Face of Progress

The celebration of the new century brought an ambitious program of public ceremonies, foremost among them the first balloon journey. The initiative belonged to Dr. Juvenal Urbino. On Arsenal Beach, half the city gathered to watch an enormous flag-colored taffeta balloon rise with the first airmail for San Juan de la Ciénaga, about thirty leagues to the northeast as the crow flies.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza, who had experienced flight at the World’s Fair in Paris, entered the wicker basket first, followed by the pilot and six distinguished guests. Their cargo included a letter from the provincial governor to San Juan de la Ciénaga’s municipal officials, documenting the journey as the first mail transported by air. Asked by a journalist from the Commercial Daily for final words in case he died, Dr. Juvenal Urbino answered, “In my opinion,” he said, “the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us.” The remark made the expedition’s promise of modernity double-edged: the city could stage a striking technological first while still feeling belated in relation to the century it claimed to welcome.

Spectacle, Age, and Historical Ruin

Florentino watched from within the crowd, not from the balloon. He heard someone object that the adventure was unsuitable for a woman, especially one as old as Fermina Daza, and felt himself in agreement. Yet the flight proved calm rather than perilous. With a favorable wind, the balloon travelled low over the spurs of snow-covered mountains and the Great Swamp before reaching its destination without incident. The public’s apprehension and the uneventful journey expose a gap between the imagined danger of modern spectacle and its actual course.

From above, the passengers could see Cartagena de Indias as a city left behind by history: its walls remained, but brambles filled its streets, heartsease overran the fortifications, and marble palaces and golden altars stood amid the image of a place abandoned during cholera panic. Its inhabitants had deserted it after three centuries of resistance to English sieges and buccaneer atrocities. The balloon thus carried the new century over a landscape where monumental endurance had not prevented decline. The moment’s significance lies in that juxtaposition: the city could send mail through the air and celebrate invention, yet the view from the sky disclosed how little technological ascent could undo the weight of its past.