Fermina Daza rejects Florentino Ariza at the Arcade of the Scribes

Fermina Daza’s rejection of Florentino Ariza at the Arcade of the Scribes is the decisive break in their first courtship: an encounter in which the crowd’s heat and commotion give way, for her, to sudden disenchantment. She recognizes that the love she has sustained in imagination is an illusion, dismisses Florentino with a wave of her hand, and follows the refusal with the return of their shared tokens. The braid he cannot bear to surrender becomes the last material remnant of their intimacy; their next private meeting comes only fifty-one years, nine months, and four days later, when he renews his vow on her first night as a widow.

The encounter in the Arcade

Seeking shade from the fierce eleven-o’clock sun, Fermina wanders through the Arcade of the Scribes, where street sellers compete in a noisy press. She is drawn to a vendor demonstrating unusual inks—blood-red, condolence-colored, phosphorescent, and invisible—and buys gold ink to amuse Florentino. At the candy stalls she points out six of each kind, unable to make herself heard over the shouting. The scene makes her seem absorbed in the small pleasures of the market and, in particular, in the thought of delighting the man she loves.

A woman selling pineapple offers Fermina a triangle of fruit on the tip of a butcher’s knife. Fermina puts it whole into her mouth and is still chewing as she looks over the crowd. Then, close behind her ear, Florentino speaks: “This is not the place for a crowned goddess.” The private signal cuts through the market din. The name recalls their intimate language, but the meeting does not restore the enchantment attached to it.

Recognition and refusal

When Fermina turns, she sees Florentino at close range: his glacial eyes, livid face, and lips rigid with fear resemble the appearance she remembers from their first close encounter at Midnight Mass. Yet the resemblance only sharpens the difference. Instead of the tumult of love she once felt, she experiences what the narration calls an abyss of disenchantment. In an instant, she sees the scale of her own mistake and wonders how she could have nourished such a chimera with such ferocity. Her response is pity—“My God, poor man!”—rather than renewed desire.

Florentino smiles, tries to speak, and tries to follow. Fermina erases him from her life with a wave of her hand, then tells him, “No, please,” and, “Forget it.” The exchange is brief, but its meaning is not ambiguous: she rejects not merely an unwelcome approach but the romantic image she had sustained for so long. The market encounter reverses the meaning of their old private signs. What had once carried the charge of a secret courtship now confirms, for Fermina, that its promise was an illusion.

The return of their shared past

That afternoon, while her father sleeps, Fermina sends Gala Placidia to Florentino with a two-line letter explaining that what lies between them is nothing more than an illusion. The messenger also returns his telegrams and verses, along with his dried camellias, and asks him to send back Fermina’s letters and gifts. The requested objects reach further into her past: Aunt Escolástica’s missal, leaves from her herbariums, a square centimeter of the habit of St. Peter Clavier, saints’ medals, and the braid from Fermina’s fifteenth year, tied with the silk ribbon of her school uniform.

Florentino responds with countless desperate letters and repeatedly besieges Gala Placidia to carry them to Fermina. She follows Fermina’s explicit instruction to accept nothing except the returned gifts. Fermina’s insistence turns separation into a practical rule: communication is closed, and the objects are to be restored rather than used to reopen the relationship. Florentino sends everything back except the braid. He will return it only in person, hoping the exchange might allow them to talk, even briefly.

The braid and the long separation

The braid has already become more than a keepsake to Florentino. He has displayed it in a stained-glass case on the wall of his room as though it were a holy relic. His refusal to return it shows how a physical remnant can preserve the intimacy Fermina has repudiated, even as it becomes the last point on which he can insist on seeing her. The object binds the rejected courtship to a past Fermina has chosen to end.

Fearing that her son might make a fatal decision, Tránsito Ariza sets aside her pride and asks Fermina for five minutes. Fermina receives her briefly in the doorway, does not invite her to sit or enter, and shows no sign of weakening. Two days later, after an argument with his mother, Florentino takes the stained-glass case down from his wall. Tránsito herself returns the braid in a velvet box embroidered with gold thread. Fermina’s refusal has thus reached beyond the couple: Florentino’s distress draws his mother into an appeal, but neither the appeal nor the relic changes Fermina’s decision.

Florentino has no further opportunity to speak with Fermina alone during their many chance encounters across their long lives. The narrative measures the interval precisely: fifty-one years, nine months, and four days, until he repeats his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow. The Arcade scene therefore closes the youthful courtship without erasing its objects or its language. The gold ink and returned letters mark a love that once relied on messages and tokens; the preserved braid marks Florentino’s refusal to let that past disappear; the later vow reveals how long the rejection will shape their separate lives.