Fermina Daza's separation from and return to Juvenal Urbino

Fermina Daza's separation from and return to Juvenal Urbino turns a marital rupture into a journey through anger, wounded privacy, and nostalgia. She leaves after learning of her husband's infidelity and his confession to a priest, but the journey to Flores de María reveals that her departure is also bound to a much older longing for home. When Juvenal comes for her, joy overwhelms her; reconciliation begins not with an apology or a declared settlement, but with her decision to return while withholding the ease of forgiveness.

The breach and departure

Fermina's anger deepened when Juvenal told her that he had spoken to his confessor. The disclosure struck her as more than his alone to make: she regarded the intimacy between husband and wife as belonging to both, and could not bear that a priest had been admitted to it. Her sense of injury was therefore not limited to the affair itself. She feared that her honor had already become material for gossip, and felt the humiliation of public exposure more intolerable than the shame and anger of infidelity.

When she learned that her husband's lover was a mulatta, the correction of the word did not soften her response. Fermina answered that it was just as bad and said she now understood the smell she had associated with the betrayal. The exchange shows how her rage fastened on the affair's intimate, bodily evidence even as the disclosure to the confessor made her feel that the marriage's private boundary had been violated.

That Monday, Juvenal and Fermina began an exhausting three-day discussion. They agreed that she should go to Flores de María and stay as long as she needed to think before making a final decision. On Friday at seven in the evening, she sailed on the regular boat to San Juan de la Ciénaga, accompanied by her goddaughter and carrying only one trunk. Her face was covered by a mantilla, both to avoid questions and to shield her husband from them. Juvenal did not meet her at the dock, by mutual agreement.

The departure was arranged to leave no opening for public speculation. Juvenal kept the journey from his social circle; even Florentino Ariza, despite his means of investigating, found no clue to Fermina's disappearance. Their children understood the trip as one their mother had long postponed and that they had wanted her to make. Juvenal expected her to return once her anger passed. Fermina, by contrast, left convinced that it would never end.

A journey into remembered places

The novel complicates that certainty by revealing that the journey did not originate in the marital crisis. Fermina had never returned to San Juan de la Ciénaga after the aborted balloon flight of her youth. Although she had traveled to Europe more than once after her honeymoon, she had not made this return to her adolescent region. She regarded going back to her cousin's province as a kind of belated redemption, and the mere prospect of seeing those places again had already offered consolation in her unhappiness.

The journey unsettles rather than restores her memories. From San Juan de la Ciénaga, the old plantation of San Pedro Alejandrino was only nine leagues away, but the yellow train took a full day, repeatedly stopping at the passengers' request. They strolled across the banana company's golf courses, bathed in cold mountain rivers, and got off to milk cows when they were hungry. At the plantation, Fermina saw the tamarinds associated with the dying Liberator and heard conflicting accounts of the bed where he had died: one visitor insisted that the supposed relic was false and that he had been left to die on the floor.

The gap between remembered and present place depressed her. Rather than risk further disappointment, she avoided the villages she had once wanted to revisit. When she had to pass through one, she covered her face with her mantilla so she could keep the place as it had been in memory. She heard accordions, shouts from cockfighting pits, and gunfire that might signal either war or celebration, yet detoured around the past instead of treating those sounds as a welcome return to it.

At Hildebranda Sánchez's ranch, Fermina encountered a possible image of her own life at a distance. Her cousin was fat and old, raising unruly children with a pensioned soldier whom she had married out of spite, although she still loved without hope the man she had once wanted. Fermina recognized that Hildebranda remained inwardly the same person despite the changes to her body and circumstances. After a few days of country life and pleasant memories, she recovered from the shock and stayed at the ranch, leaving only for Sunday Mass with the grandchildren of the women who had once been their conspirators.

Flores de María, which Fermina had not visited on her earlier trip because she thought she would dislike it, fascinated her when she finally saw it. Yet afterward she could remember it only as she had imagined it before arriving, not as it actually was. Her return thus brought no simple recovery of the past: places either disappointed her, remained protected by deliberate avoidance, or were overwritten by anticipation.

Juvenal comes for her

Juvenal decided to go to the ranch after receiving a report from the Bishop of Riohacha. The bishop believed that Fermina's prolonged stay came not from unwillingness to return but from an inability to find a way around her pride. Juvenal exchanged letters with Hildebranda, learned that his wife was consumed by nostalgia and now thought only of home, and set out without notifying Fermina.

At eleven in the morning, Fermina was in the kitchen preparing stuffed eggplant when she heard peons shouting, horses neighing, and guns fired into the air. Then came resolute footsteps in the courtyard and Juvenal's voice. His unannounced arrival turned the prospect of return into an immediate encounter. She thought she might die of joy and thanked God under her breath, but she also worried that she had not bathed, looked old and sunburned, and would make him regret coming.

She dried her hands on her apron, arranged herself as best she could, and gathered her habitual haughtiness to steady her racing heart. She went to meet him with her head high and her eyes shining, grateful for the relief of going home. The scene holds delight and resistance together: she was happy to leave with him, but not prepared to make the return an uncomplicated surrender.

Return without easy forgiveness

Fermina had made the decision to return, but she had not abandoned her grievance. She intended to make Juvenal pay with her silence for the bitter suffering that had, in her words as recounted by the narration, ended her life. The separation therefore resolves the immediate question of whether she will come home without erasing the injury that sent her away.

The episode makes nostalgia the hinge between estrangement and reunion. Fermina's departure begins in anger over infidelity and the exposure of marital intimacy, yet her return is prepared by memories of San Juan de la Ciénaga and her longing for home. That longing does not excuse Juvenal's actions or cancel her pride. Instead, it allows her to choose a return on terms that preserve her anger: affection draws her back, while silence keeps the conflict alive.