Fermina rejects Florentino at the Arcade of the Scribes in a meeting that turns an imagined romance into a face-to-face reckoning. After returning to the city, she encounters Florentino in the noisy market; the sight of his frightened, familiar face replaces the love she expected to feel with disenchantment. Her refusal is immediate, then made final through a letter and the return of their accumulated tokens. The encounter closes their private relationship for fifty-one years, nine months, and four days, until Florentino renews his vow of love on her first night as a widow.

The encounter in the market

Florentino has spent the weekend watching for Fermina’s return. When he sees a light move through her house on Monday evening, he stays awake through the night, overcome by the nausea that had disturbed his first nights of love. By morning he is exhausted beneath the arches of the Parish Café, still trying to devise a way to welcome her. Seeing her cross the Plaza of the Cathedral with Gala Placidia, who carries the marketing baskets, gives him the chance he has been awaiting.

Fermina is no longer wearing her school uniform. She has grown taller and more composed, and her braid, now twisted over her left shoulder rather than hanging down her back, makes her seem to have left childhood behind. Florentino watches her cross the plaza and then follows her into the market, where she moves easily through the crowd while Gala Placidia struggles to keep pace. The scene is structured around their unequal perspectives: Florentino sees the woman he loves in her ordinary, unobserved gestures, while Fermina experiences the market as a newly opened world of her own.

Her excursion unfolds in unhurried curiosity. She tours the stalls and shops, touches the wares, and takes pleasure in what she finds. A seller’s display of magic inks catches her attention; she chooses gold ink because she wants to amuse Florentino and show him her wit. At the candy stalls, unable to make herself heard above the noise, she points out six of each kind and has them placed in the baskets. Eating a piece of pineapple offered by a woman in the crowd, she looks over the market and suddenly hears Florentino close behind her.

Recognition and rejection

Florentino addresses her with the coded compliment, “This is not the place for a crowned goddess.” The phrase recalls the intensity and distance of their earlier courtship, but the encounter does not restore that imagined intimacy. Fermina turns and sees his glacial eyes, livid face, and lips fixed with fear. The resemblance to their earlier meeting at Midnight Mass is present, yet its emotional meaning has reversed: instead of the commotion of love, she feels disenchantment.

In that instant Fermina recognizes what she takes to be the mistake at the heart of their relationship. She wonders how she could have nurtured a chimera for so long and with such force. Her compassion for Florentino is not a change of mind; she thinks of him as a poor man even as she withdraws from him. Florentino smiles, tries to speak, and attempts to follow, but Fermina ends the encounter with a wave of her hand and a direct request: “No, please,” she said to him. “Forget it.” The scene’s decisive turn is the gap between the romance Florentino has preserved and the reality Fermina now sees.

The return of the courtship tokens

That afternoon, while her father is taking his siesta, Fermina sends Gala Placidia with a short letter declaring that what lies between her and Florentino is nothing more than an illusion. The message makes explicit what her gesture in the market has already communicated: she is not asking for time or inviting persuasion, but rejecting the relationship as she had understood it.

The maid returns Florentino’s telegrams, verses, and dried camellias, and asks him to send back Fermina’s letters and gifts. The requested objects reach far beyond the written courtship. They include Aunt Escolástica’s missal, leaves from Fermina’s herbarium, a square centimeter of a saint’s habit, medals of the saints, and the braid she had cut in her fifteenth year and tied with the ribbon of her school uniform. Their return turns the breakup into a deliberate dismantling of the shared history preserved in keepsakes.

Florentino answers the refusal with countless desperate letters and repeatedly tries to persuade Gala Placidia to carry them to Fermina. She follows Fermina’s strict instructions and accepts nothing except the returned gifts. Florentino sends the objects back, but withholds the braid, insisting that he will return it to Fermina in person so they can speak, even briefly. The relic he had displayed in a stained-glass case becomes his last attempted reason to see her.

Separation and long consequence

Tránsito Ariza fears that her son’s distress may end in disaster. Swallowing her pride, she asks Fermina to give him five minutes. Fermina receives her briefly at the doorway but does not invite her inside or ask her to sit, and shows no sign of relenting. Two days later, after arguing with his mother, Florentino takes the braid down from its place on the wall. Tránsito herself returns it in a velvet box embroidered with gold thread, completing the exchange that Fermina had demanded.

The refusal establishes a long boundary in their lives. Through many chance encounters, Florentino has no further opportunity to see or speak with Fermina alone until fifty-one years, nine months, and four days later. On her first night as a widow, he repeats his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love. The later declaration does not erase the market scene: it gives the earlier rejection its full temporal weight. A meeting that lasts only moments separates the lovers across most of their lives, while the braid and other returned keepsakes preserve the material trace of a courtship Fermina has repudiated and Florentino cannot relinquish.