Loyalty and Disloyalty

Fidelity and infidelity in Florentino Ariza’s intimate life do not form a simple opposition between exclusive devotion and betrayal. His lovers, remembered together at a party given by Leona Cassiani, reveal a pattern in which he maintained connections across decades while continuing to give Fermina Daza a unique place in his emotional life. The phrase “Unfaithful but not disloyal,” the motto he shared with the Widow Nazaret, gives this contradiction its clearest name, though his memories also show its limits and costs.

A motto for an intermittent relationship

Florentino’s relationship with the Widow Nazaret began when she was invited into his mother’s house on the Street of Windows by Tránsito Ariza, not by Florentino himself. Of his lovers, he felt she had shown him the tenderness most capable of compensating for his longing for Fermina, although their relationship had its own dissatisfactions and neither partner remained exclusive. They nevertheless continued as intermittent lovers for almost thirty years, guided by their musketeers’ motto: “Unfaithful but not disloyal.” Their arrangement made room for infidelity without treating it as the end of their bond.

That distinction was not merely a playful phrase. When Florentino learned that the Widow Nazaret had died and was headed for a pauper’s grave, he paid for her burial and attended her funeral as the only mourner. His final responsibility toward her gives the motto a practical meaning: an enduring attachment could survive a relationship’s interruptions and its lack of exclusivity. Yet this loyalty did not displace Fermina. The Widow Nazaret mattered deeply to him, but she occupied a different place from the woman whose memory repeatedly reclaimed his attention.

Many attachments, one recurring center

At Leona Cassiani’s party, Florentino’s recollections encompass lovers who had died as well as women still living. He had kept track of their lives through difficult periods, and, when fearful, wanted to be with them all at once. This retrospective gathering of attachments makes his emotional life seem less like a succession in which each new lover erases the last than a crowded field of continuing memories. The relationships differ in duration and character, but they remain present together in his mind.

Rosalba, the first woman he remembered, had taken his virginity aboard a boat. He later considered searching for her, though he did not know where to look, what her last name was, or even whether he would recognize the person he found. Each planned journey was postponed at the last moment, sometimes by practical difficulty and sometimes by his own faltering will; each delay ultimately had something to do with Fermina Daza. The repeated interruption turns an imagined return to an earlier lover into evidence of the enduring force of his attachment to Fermina.

His memory of Ángeles Alfaro offers another measure of the difference between grief and disloyalty. She taught string instruments at the Music School for six months, and she and Florentino fell in love during that brief time. When she left on an ocean liner, he grieved intensely. He understood through that parting that it was possible to love several people at once, to feel sorrow for each, and not to betray any of them. But after the ship disappeared, Fermina Daza once again occupied all the space in his memory. The sequence does not cancel the grief for Ángeles; instead, it shows how one attachment could be sincere and painful without becoming the central attachment.

Florentino compressed this crowded emotional capacity into the thought, “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.” The image captures both abundance and instability: the heart has room for multiple loves, but those rooms do not make every relationship equivalent. His many attachments coexist with a persistent hierarchy in which Fermina remains irreplaceable.

The boundaries of loyalty

The other relationships in Florentino’s recollection test the motto in different ways. Andrea Varón had a clandestine life as a courtesan and an arrangement with Florentino that crossed both their usual rules about payment: they agreed on a symbolic fee of one peso, which neither exchanged, saving the imagined payments toward a purchase from overseas. Their relationship was therefore marked by negotiated exceptions and secrecy, rather than by a claim to exclusivity. The episode broadens the range of the arrangements that Florentino could maintain, but it does not establish that each lover understood fidelity in the same way.

The memories also distinguish attachment from simple permanence. Ángeles Alfaro left after six months; other relationships continued intermittently for years. Florentino remembered Prudencia Pitre, who had outlived two husbands, and Prudencia Arellano, whose affection found expression in contrivances that prolonged his visits. He also recalled Josefa Zúñiga, whose possessiveness could turn dangerous, and Sara Noriega, the only woman among his many encounters who had made him taste bitterness. These contrasting histories show that a long connection, an intense feeling, and a mutually generous bond are not interchangeable measures of loyalty.

As Florentino took complete responsibility for the R.C.C., he had less time and desire to seek a replacement for Fermina Daza. He came to recognize that she was irreplaceable and settled into a routine of visiting established lovers for as long as the relationships pleased both sides and lasted. His eventual reduction to one remaining lover, América Vicuña, marks a change in the number and pattern of his relationships, not a new claim that his earlier attachments had been meaningless. In the recollection at Leona’s party, the many rooms remain visible, while Fermina’s place at their center remains distinct.

Meaning and limits of the distinction

“Unfaithful but not disloyal” names a way of separating sexual exclusivity from enduring care. Florentino’s conduct repeatedly crosses the boundary of exclusive partnership, but his memories preserve tenderness, grief, responsibility, and continuing attention toward particular women. His burial of the Widow Nazaret and his grief at Ángeles Alfaro’s departure make clear that the relationships are not portrayed as interchangeable episodes devoid of feeling.

The same evidence prevents the motto from becoming a universal defense. It describes a particular understanding shared with the Widow Nazaret; the recollections do not show that every lover agreed to the same terms. Florentino’s private sense that he could love several people without betraying any of them cannot by itself establish how those women understood their relationships. The narrative’s contrast is therefore not simply between faithful and faithless conduct. It is between different forms of attachment—some brief, some recurring, some remembered with sorrow—and the enduring emotional priority Florentino gives to Fermina Daza.