Florentino Ariza and Ausencia Santander’s long-term affair

Florentino Ariza and Ausencia Santander’s long-term affair begins as an unplanned encounter and continues for more than seven years, exposing the limits of Florentino’s tidy theories about love. Their intimacy is shaped by secrecy, the rhythms of a riverboat captain’s absences, and Ausencia’s unapologetic command of her own pleasure; even after her beautifully furnished home is looted, Florentino continues to visit, though the novelty of the mule-drawn trolley gradually draws him elsewhere.

Background and Beginning

By the time Florentino meets Ausencia, he has formed simplistic ideas about women’s appearance and sexual aptitude, recording his observations for a practical supplement to the Lovers’ Companion. Ausencia overturns those theories. Her influence teaches him that life cannot be mastered by instruction, an insight the novel states in direct contrast to the prescriptive project he had imagined.

The introduction comes through Captain Rosendo de la Rosa, a riverboat captain who brings Florentino to Ausencia’s home for lunch. Ausencia has been married for twenty years and has children and grandchildren; the circumstances of her separation remain uncertain. Her husband lives with his regular mistress, and Ausencia now receives Rosendo openly, though she once met him at the back door at night. Rosendo introduces Florentino without ceremony, and the visit is meant to be a meal rather than the beginning of a lasting affair.

The house impresses Florentino as much as its hostess. Bright and cool, with four large windows facing the sea and a view of the old city, it is crowded with handcrafted objects Rosendo has brought back from his voyages. On the terrace sits a white cockatoo from Malaya, the most beautiful animal Florentino has ever seen. The house’s abundance and the bird’s vivid presence later make the discovery of its emptiness all the more striking.

At lunch, Rosendo drinks heavily from a demijohn of homemade aguardiente. Before the meal begins, he has consumed half of it and collapses across the tray of glasses and bottles. Ausencia asks Florentino to help drag the inert captain to bed and undress him. In the adjoining room, she and Florentino undress without first proposing or discussing what they are doing. The affair begins through this impulsive, wordless transition from caretaking to sex.

A Secret Routine, on Ausencia’s Terms

The captain’s absences provide the practical condition for the affair. He has a sailor’s habit of signaling the port when his ship arrives: three long blasts for his wife and nine children, followed by two short, melancholy ones for his mistress. Florentino learns when to visit from the ship’s itineraries. He comes unannounced, at any hour, and Ausencia is always waiting.

Their encounters follow a ritual that makes the balance of power between them unmistakable. Ausencia opens the door naked, with an organdy ribbon in her hair, and will not let Florentino proceed until she has undressed him; she considers a clothed man in the house bad luck. Rosendo’s contrary superstition—that smoking naked brings bad luck—sometimes makes him put off sex rather than abandon his Cuban cigar. Florentino, by contrast, is delighted by nudity, but his role in the ritual is carefully limited: he removes his watch and chain, takes off his glasses, and puts them in his boots so he will not forget them.

Ausencia directs their lovemaking and pursues her own pleasure without waiting for Florentino. He is left exhausted and feeling incomplete, as though he has served merely as an instrument. He complains, “You treat me as if I were just anybody.” She answers, “Not at all: as if you were nobody.” The exchange crystallizes the affair’s asymmetry: she refuses to flatter his self-image, while he both resents her disregard and remains drawn to the encounter.

Florentino leaves determined not to return, but wakes in the middle of the night remembering the happiness he had dismissed. He recognizes it as a trap he both despises and desires, one he cannot escape. The relationship therefore unsettles him not by rewarding his romantic ideals but by binding him to a pleasure that does not place him at its center.

Signs of Attachment and a Change in Their Pattern

The first clear sign that Ausencia’s feelings have changed comes two years after they meet. One Sunday, instead of undressing Florentino, she first removes his glasses so she can kiss him more easily. He understands this small alteration as evidence that she has begun to love him.

Until then, the affair has been sharply bounded. Although Florentino feels at home in the house, he stays no longer than two hours, has never slept there, and has eaten there only once, when formally invited. He brings one rose and disappears until the next unpredictable visit. After Ausencia takes off his glasses to kiss him, they fall asleep following a gentle encounter and spend the afternoon naked in the captain’s enormous bed. For Florentino, the shift is not simply from sex to tenderness; it is a rare suspension of the brisk routine by which he has kept the affair at a distance.

When he wakes, he hears the cockatoo shrieking and senses that someone is watching them. He tells Ausencia that he feels something strange. She laughs at his explanation, and they remain together in silence without making love again. At five, she leaves the bedroom to find a drink and screams: the furnishings, rugs, statues, tapestries, ornaments, and even the cockatoo have disappeared. Thieves have carried everything out through the sea terrace while the lovers were in the bedroom, leaving the wall marked with the message, “This is what you get for fucking around.” The raid turns the house from a setting of carefully arranged abundance into the exposed scene of their secret.

The Looted House and the Affair’s Afterlife

Captain Rosendo cannot understand why Ausencia does not report the robbery, contact dealers in stolen goods, or permit anyone to speak of her misfortune again. Florentino continues to visit her in the stripped house, where only three leather stools forgotten in the kitchen and the contents of the bedroom remain. The loss of the furnishings does not end their connection.

The reason Florentino visits less often is not the desolation of the house, despite Ausencia’s belief that it is. At the turn of the century, a mule-drawn trolley becomes a new and remarkably effective setting for his secret pursuits. He rides it four times a day, twice to the office and twice home, and uses its journeys to begin arranging future encounters. Later, when Uncle Leo XII gives him a carriage drawn by two small gray mules with golden trappings, Florentino remembers the trolley as a more fruitful vehicle for his adventures: a carriage waiting at the door is a poor ally to clandestine love, while the trolley lets a sideways glance reveal where an opportunity lies.

The affair with Ausencia thus retains its place in Florentino’s memory even as his attention moves among other possibilities. Its defining contrast is between the ordered romantic theories he tries to write down and the unpredictable experience that defeats them: an encounter prompted by a drunken collapse, a lover who sets the terms, a gesture with his glasses that signals affection, and a house emptied without interrupting their intimacy. Their more than seven years together give him no mastery of love; instead, they leave him with the knowledge that desire can persist precisely where pride feels wounded.