Let time pass and we will see what it brings

“Let time pass and we will see what it brings” is Fermina Daza’s counsel to Florentino Ariza as their correspondence resumes in old age. The phrase gives their renewed connection a different temporal direction: instead of trying to recover their vanished youth, he must learn to face the future and the limits of his own life.

The phrase in their correspondence

After Fermina asked Florentino not to telephone her, the two maintained contact through letters, a discreet choice in a city where the telephone operator knew subscribers’ private affairs and could expose their conversations. Their exchange grew frequent and intense. They called each other tú again and shared commentaries on their lives, echoing the intimacy of their earlier letters.

Florentino, however, tried to restore the past too quickly. He wrote Fermina’s name with a pin on the petals of a camellia and sent it in a letter; she returned the flower without a message. He also repeatedly evoked their youthful meetings and the places where their first courtship had unfolded. Fermina regarded these gestures as childish and challenged his insistence on speaking of a past she felt no longer existed.

Advice against haste

Fermina understood Florentino’s haste as a refusal to grow old naturally. The phrase was her attempt to give him courage to meet the future, reversing their former positions: the woman who had once drawn strength from his thoughts about widowhood now tried to steady him. Its measured openness offered neither a promise nor a rejection. Time, rather than a revived version of their youthful romance, would reveal what their relationship could become.

Florentino did not understand the counsel as readily as Fermina intended. Immobilized and increasingly aware that time was passing, he wanted to see her urgently. His condition made his fear of falling seem tragically prescient and forced him, for the first time, to consider death in a reasoned way. Against that pressure, Fermina’s words ask him not to mistake urgency for a way to recover what has gone by.

Significance

The phrase marks a change in the rhythm of their late-life courtship. Their letters renew an old intimacy, but Fermina resists making the present a reenactment of their youth. Her advice joins affection to restraint: the future remains possible, yet neither of them can command what it will bring. In the contrast between Florentino’s rush and Fermina’s patience, the expression becomes a practical answer to aging, nostalgia, and the uncertainty of renewed love.