Fermina Daza and Juvenal Urbino’s reconciliation

Fermina Daza and Juvenal Urbino’s reconciliation is a turning point in their marriage: after Fermina confronts the unhappiness she has concealed, the couple choose to search together for the love they have lost. Their renewed bond does not restore the exclusive intimacy of their honeymoon. Instead, it develops into a practical, imperfect harmony, shaped by travel, family life, and Juvenal’s acceptance of what remains of his wife’s affection.

The refuge and the remembered past

After her separation from Juvenal, Fermina finds refuge in the house her father left her, away from the suffocation of the family palace. When she can slip out of public view, she goes to the Park of the Evangels to spend time with new companions and people from her school and painting classes. The visits provide an innocent substitute for infidelity, while the house itself allows her to live among what remains of her girlhood. She has the perfumed crows replaced, takes in stray cats for Gala Placidia to care for, and reopens the sewing room that holds the history of her first encounters with both Florentino Ariza and Juvenal. She turns it into a sanctuary of the past.

One winter afternoon, as Fermina goes to close the balcony against an approaching storm, she sees Florentino sitting beneath the almond trees in the little park. His father’s suit has been altered to fit him; an open book rests on his lap. What she sees is not simply the man before her but the young Florentino fixed in her memory. The vision frightens her as a possible omen of death, and her grief gives way to a more unsettling recognition: she can imagine that she might have been happier with him in the restored house. The possibility dismays her because it makes the depth of her present unhappiness impossible to ignore.

The decision to try again

Fermina responds to that recognition by forcing a reckoning with Juvenal. She insists that he speak without evasion and remain with her through an argument that becomes a shared outpouring of anger and grief over their lost paradise. Their conversation lasts through the night, until the last rooster crows and daylight enters through the lace curtains. Rather than leave the crisis unresolved, Juvenal finally tells her that they will go to Europe to look for the love they have lost, beginning the next day and continuing thereafter.

The decision is made with unusual firmness. Juvenal arranges for the Treasury Bank and his general administrator to liquidate the family fortune, which is spread across businesses, investments, and long-term bonds. The wealth is converted into stamped gold for gradual placement in foreign bank accounts. He intends that he and Fermina will own nothing in their country, not even a plot on which to die. The financial arrangements give material form to the couple’s decision to leave and start again abroad.

Europe, return, and family life

The reconciliation unfolds over more than one journey. Fermina and Juvenal later return to Europe three times, despite her earlier intention, after an unhappy trip, never to go back. During a two-year stay in Paris, they are only beginning to find what remains of their love among the ruins of the marriage when a midnight telegram announces that Juvenal’s mother, Doña Blanca de Urbino, is gravely ill. A second telegram brings news of her death, and they return without delay. Fermina arrives pregnant; the condition is noticed beneath her black tunic and becomes the subject of a teasing popular song that is sung for the rest of the year. Juvenal later requests the song at Social Club dances, treating the joke as evidence of his own good humor.

After their return, Fermina remains in her father’s house until the villa in La Manga is completed. She enters it prepared to command, bringing English furniture acquired on their honeymoon and additional furnishings ordered after their reconciliation trip. She also begins filling the villa with exotic animals that she buys from schooners arriving from the Antilles. The household takes shape around Fermina, Juvenal, their son, and their daughter Ofelia, born four months after the family’s return. The new home gives the reconciliation a visible setting, but it does not mean that Fermina’s independent judgment or desires have disappeared.

A changed form of marital harmony

Juvenal understands that he cannot possess Fermina as completely as he did on their honeymoon. The part of her love he wants is also what she gives, along with her best hours, to their children. He learns to live with and be happy with what remains. This adjustment makes their reconciliation less a recovery of an earlier marriage than a new arrangement within it: Juvenal accepts a divided attention, and Fermina participates in a family life whose terms are no longer identical to those of the honeymoon.

Their harmony becomes apparent in an unceremonious domestic episode. At a gala dinner, Fermina enjoys two generous portions of a dish she cannot identify, then discovers that it is pureed eggplant. She accepts the discovery with good humor. Eggplant subsequently appears at the villa almost as often as it once did at the Palace of Casalduero, and Juvenal jokes in his old age that he wants another daughter so he can name her Eggplant Urbino. The episode gives their renewed life its characteristic scale: reconciliation is registered not only in declarations and travel, but in shared meals, recurring jokes, and habits that become part of the household.

Fermina’s own later understanding remains more complicated. She comes to see private life as fickle and unpredictable, and she recognizes a disillusionment between the person she once dreamed of becoming and the woman she has become. Though society loves, caters to, and fears her, she considers herself a kind of deluxe servant, ruling a large household that Juvenal built and for which he remains central. She knows he loves her above all others, but also feels that his love is ultimately organized around his own needs. The reconciliation therefore restores companionship without erasing the imbalance and dissatisfaction Fermina continues to perceive. Its significance lies in that unresolved mixture: she and Juvenal recover a life together, but not the paradise whose loss they mourned.