Fermina and Florentino's voyage on New Fidelity

Fermina and Florentino’s voyage on New Fidelity begins as Fermina’s act of self-determination: after feeling displaced in her own home, she decides to leave and travel upriver without a chaperone. The journey turns a long-held dream into a real departure, but its first night does not immediately become a romantic idyll. Fermina boards carrying grief for her dead husband and a desire to be alone; Florentino accompanies her, while the river and the ship’s elaborate suite hold open the possibility of a shared future.

The Decision to Leave

The journey becomes possible after Fermina, embittered by conflict within her family and by the collapse of her trust in Lucrecia del Real del Obispo, feels superfluous in her own house. Looking out toward the patio, she says she wants to walk away and keep going without returning. Florentino answers simply that she could take a boat. The proposal does not create her desire to leave: only after she says she might do it does the possibility become real to her.

Florentino tries to encourage her with maps, postcards of sunsets, and poems celebrating the Magdalena River. Fermina makes clear that these are not what will decide her. She will go because she has chosen to, not because he has persuaded her with scenery. When her son suggests that his wife accompany her, Fermina refuses the arrangement, insisting on her capacity to manage for herself. She organizes the trip independently and plans eight days upriver and five on the return, taking only a few cotton dresses, toiletries, shoes for boarding and disembarking, and slippers. The sparse packing is part of the appeal: the river voyage is not merely a change of setting but a chance to travel with no more than the necessities.

New Fidelity and an Old Dream

The ship’s name joins the present journey to the history of river navigation. In January 1824, Commodore Johann Bernard Elbers registered Fidelity, an old forty-horsepower steamboat described as a wreck and remembered as the first to sail the Magdalena. More than a century later, New Fidelity, the first vessel built in the local shipyards, takes Fermina on her first river voyage. She cannot quite accept that the name’s significance for her and Florentino is only historical coincidence; she suspects it may also express Florentino’s habitual romanticism.

The vessel’s Presidential Suite makes that romantic expectation material. Built beside the Captain’s quarters, it includes a sitting room with brightly colored bamboo furniture, a bedroom decorated in Chinese motifs, a bathroom with a tub and shower, and an enclosed observation deck with hanging ferns and views forward and to either side. Its cooling system excludes outside noise and maintains what the description calls a perpetual spring. The suite had been constructed for official guests, and three presidents had already traveled in it. Florentino, however, had privately imagined it as the refuge of a wedding journey with Fermina. When she boards, she takes possession of it as its mistress, bringing that private anticipation into the reality of the trip without making the voyage itself a declaration of marriage.

Departure and Parting

Before boarding, Fermina visits her husband’s crypt at La Manga Cemetery. There she speaks to him in a private monologue, voicing the recriminations she had held back, explaining the trip, and saying goodbye for now. The ritual complicates the apparent freedom of departure: she is setting out alone, yet she carries her marriage and her unresolved words with her. She has traveled before, including to Europe, but this departure agitates her as if it were the first.

At the gangplank, her son and daughter-in-law give her an unceremonious farewell. Her son assumes Florentino will follow her, then discovers that he is traveling too. Florentino shows his ordinary cabin key as evidence that he is not occupying Fermina’s suite, but the gesture does not convince her son that the arrangement is innocent. He looks to Fermina for reassurance; she responds coldly and recognizes in his objection the same belief held by his sister, Ofelia Urbino: that love at a certain age becomes indecent. Her son recovers enough to shake Florentino’s hand, though the farewell is resigned rather than grateful. Fermina and her son and daughter-in-law then look back and wave to Florentino as their automobile leaves the freight yard.

The First Night on the River

Captain Diego Samaritano hosts a dinner with champagne and smoked salmon and tells stories drawn from his forty years on the river. Fermina makes an effort to appear amused, though she has hardly spoken. The ship’s departure is delayed: despite the final warning and the raising of the gangplank, it waits until the Captain has finished eating and gone to the bridge. Fermina and Florentino remain by the railing among passengers betting on whether they can identify the city lights. The vessel moves out of the bay, follows invisible channels through swamps marked by fishermen’s lights, and finally enters the open Magdalena River. Music starts and the passengers surge into dancing, while Fermina withdraws to her cabin.

Florentino lets her remain alone with her thoughts. She is not tired, she explains, only a little cold, and invites him to sit with her on her private deck. He brings wicker chairs to the railing, switches off the lights, and places a woolen shawl around her shoulders. Fermina rolls and smokes cigarettes from the small tobacco box Florentino has brought; he drinks mountain coffee from two thermoses. Their quiet companionship is built from practical gestures and shared silence rather than conversation. She sits as if in another world, and Florentino stops recounting his own youthful memories of the river when he realizes they do not draw her out. He leaves her with her thoughts, rolling cigarettes and passing them to her already lit until the box is empty.

The Voyage’s Emotional Threshold

The first evening holds several departures at once. Fermina leaves the house where she has felt unwanted, separates from her son and daughter-in-law, and makes a provisional farewell to her dead husband. Yet leaving does not erase these ties: the crypt visit and her private grief accompany her aboard. Her refusal of a chaperone establishes that the trip is hers to direct, even as Florentino’s presence and the cabin he occupies make the journey a shared undertaking.

New Fidelity’s name and the Presidential Suite give Florentino’s long-imagined wedding voyage a physical setting, while Fermina’s reserve prevents that setting from dictating what the journey means. The ship travels from city lights and crowded celebration into darkness, moonlight, and relative solitude. On the private deck, neither recollection nor romantic expectation can compel her response. The voyage begins not with a promised resolution but with Fermina’s chosen movement upriver and the possibility of intimacy held open in the silence between them.