Flores de María is both a village and the rural setting of Hildebranda Sánchez’s ranch, where Fermina Daza retreats during the most serious crisis of her long marriage to Juvenal Urbino. Fermina goes there in anger and with no settled plan for return; the place becomes an interval in which nostalgia, old age, and pride gradually make reconciliation possible. Its significance lies in the contrast between the life Fermina tries to choose for herself and the home she comes to miss.

Setting and Arrival

Fermina leaves secretly at midnight, her face covered by a black mantilla, aboard the regular boat to San Juan de la Ciénaga. She tells her children that she intends to spend about three months with her aunt, Hildebranda, but has resolved not to return. Her departure follows the couple’s unexpected marital crisis: rather than settle it through the shouting and intermediaries familiar in the Caribbean, she and Juvenal try to manage it with what they imagine to be European wisdom, only to become stuck in an indecisive, childish impasse. Fury finally drives Fermina away, while Juvenal’s guilt keeps him from stopping her.

The ranch near Flores de María is not simply a destination in that departure. It offers Fermina a new daily setting, away from her household and the habits of married life, while leaving her bound to the home she has left. Juvenal learns through his son’s letters that she appears content there when the children spend their school vacation at the ranch. Yet the appearance of contentment does not resolve the separation: the couple continue a formal exchange about their children and household affairs, and nearly two years pass before either can overcome the pride obstructing a return.

A Landscape of Memory and Disillusionment

The journey toward Hildebranda’s ranch takes Fermina through places charged with the past. On the way, she visits San Pedro Alejandrino, where she sees the tamarinds associated with the dying Liberator and hears conflicting accounts of the bed on which he died. The trip depresses her rather than restoring the remembered world she had hoped to recover. She avoids the villages of her nostalgia, hears accordions and cockfighting shouts on her detours, and covers her face with her mantilla when she must pass through a village, trying to preserve the past from the disappointment of seeing it changed.

After this deliberate avoidance, Fermina arrives at the ranch and encounters Hildebranda as a kind of mirror of time. Her cousin is now fat and old, burdened with unruly children; she has married a pensioned soldier out of spite, although she still loves another man without hope. The shock soon gives way to country life and pleasant memories. Fermina seldom leaves the ranch except for Sunday Mass, which she attends with the grandchildren of the cousins’ former conspirators. The young riders and the girls singing in oxcarts recall an earlier generation, but they also mark the distance between youthful possibility and the life the women have actually lived.

Fermina is fascinated by Flores de María when she finally passes through it. The village, however, later survives in her memory not as she encountered it but as she had imagined it before arriving. That displacement echoes the larger journey: experience cannot simply restore an earlier home or an untouched past. Her attempts to protect remembered places from disillusionment and the way Flores de María becomes an imagined place in retrospect make nostalgia both a comfort and a distortion.

Separation and the Long Return

The separation is neither an uncomplicated escape nor an immediate reconciliation. Juvenal accepts Fermina’s decision with humility, understanding it as punishment for his sins, and the couple both regret their weakness almost as soon as the boat disappears from view. Still, regret does not give either of them a way through pride. Their letters remain restricted to practical family matters, while Fermina’s stay lengthens beyond the temporary change of scene she had announced to her children.

A visit by the Bishop of Riohacha provides a discreet route back into the relationship. The Bishop comes to the ranch during a pastoral visit, with pilgrims, musicians, peddlers, and people seeking the reputed miracles of his white mule. After lunch with Hildebranda’s family, he asks Fermina to confess. She refuses amiably but firmly, explaining that she has nothing to repent of. Though she does not consciously intend it, she knows her answer will reach Juvenal. Her refusal is therefore both an assertion of her own judgment and a message that can cross the distance between them without either having to surrender openly to the other.

Juvenal eventually decides to go for her after receiving the Bishop’s report and corresponding with Hildebranda. He understands that Fermina’s prolonged stay comes not from a settled refusal to return but from her inability to find a path around her pride. He arrives without warning. When Fermina hears the peons shout, the horses neigh, and guns fire in the courtyard, she is preparing stuffed eggplant in the kitchen. The sudden arrival turns the ranch from a place of separation into the scene of a possible homecoming.

Homecoming and Aftermath

Fermina is overcome with joy, but the return is not a simple submission. She hastily washes and dries her hands on her apron, worries that the sun has made her look old and unattractive, and gathers the haughtiness that will steady her before she meets Juvenal. She is grateful for the relief of going home, yet intends to make him pay through silence for the suffering that brought her to the ranch. The reunion thus contains two truths at once: she wants to leave with him, and she remains unwilling to erase the injury or abandon her pride.

After Fermina returns, Hildebranda visits her in the city. The cousins spend long hours recalling their first meeting and looking at an old photograph of themselves as young women; Hildebranda brings her faded copy after Fermina’s own has been lost. Fermina’s later visit to Flores de María remains part of a larger reckoning with age, lost expectations, and the gap between memory and lived experience. The ranch has given her temporary distance from her marriage, but it has not replaced home. Its lasting narrative function is to make the movement back emotionally legible: reconciliation becomes possible not because the separation meant nothing, but because longing, pride, and shared history remain intertwined.