The correspondence between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza

The correspondence between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza is the secret infrastructure of their first love: letters and telegrams carry an intimacy that distance, paternal surveillance, and separation cannot otherwise sustain. It moves from a shower of forbidden messages to a practical plan for marriage, then ends when Fermina meets Florentino again and rejects the love they had built through words. The returned messages and keepsakes leave the relationship’s material remains in Florentino’s hands, with one braid held back for decades as the token of a conversation that never came.

The Journey and the Hidden Messages

During Fermina Daza’s journey with her father, Lorenzo Daza, the reunion with her cousin Hildebranda Sánchez brings the correspondence into the open. At midnight, after the visitors have left and the public celebration has dwindled, Hildebranda bolts the bedroom door and draws a wax-sealed manila envelope from beneath her straw matting. It bears the emblem of the national telegraph. Fermina tears the red seal with her teeth and reads eleven forbidden telegrams, weeping until dawn. The scene gives the messages a physical secrecy: they have been hidden under a bed, concealed from the family, and delivered into a private room by someone willing to protect her.

The route by which Florentino finds Fermina is itself a communications network. Before the journey, Lorenzo makes the mistake of telegraphing its news to his brother-in-law Lisímaco Sánchez. Lisímaco passes it through an extensive network of relatives across the province; Florentino learns the itinerary and builds a brotherhood of telegraph operators to follow Fermina as far as Cabo de la Vela. Their exchanges continue from her arrival in Valledupar, where she stays three months, until Riohacha, the end of a journey lasting a year and a half. The correspondence thus crosses both distance and a chain of intermediaries: the same kinship network intended to keep Fermina’s family informed gives Florentino the information needed to reach her.

From Longing to a Marriage Pact

The lovers’ telegraphic exchange changes as Fermina’s confidence returns. After hearing that Lorenzo has entertained the possibility of arranging her marriage to the wealthy heir Cleofás Moscote, she consults a fortuneteller with Hildebranda. The prediction of a long and happy marriage gives her courage; convinced that such a future can belong only with Florentino, she takes command of her fate. Their correspondence stops being a concert of intentions and promises and becomes methodical and practical. They set dates, establish ways to meet, and pledge themselves to marry without consulting anyone, wherever and however they can, once they are together again.

That commitment governs a small but revealing decision. When Lorenzo permits Fermina to attend her first adult dance in Fonseca, she does not accept until she has asked her fiancé’s permission. Florentino is playing cards with Lotario Thugut at a transient hotel when an urgent telegram arrives. A telegraph operator in Fonseca has keyed the message through seven intermediate stations. Fermina asks not only whether she may go, but for proof that Florentino is on the other end. He sends their identifying password, “I swear by the crowned goddess.” Recognizing it, Fermina attends the dance until seven in the morning, then hurries to change in time for Mass. Her father takes her altered manner for evidence that distance has cured her of youthful fantasies; in fact, letters and telegrams fill the bottom of her trunk, and she has learned to behave as though already married.

The Promise of a Treasure

The correspondence also becomes a place where Florentino announces the scale of his devotion. He tells Fermina that he intends to salvage the treasure of a sunken galleon for her. The idea has come to him while watching fishermen from the jetties, where mullein brings fish to the surface in a spectacle he regards as a prohibited miracle. The plant’s use to stupefy fish has been illegal since colonial times, though it remains common among Caribbean fishermen until dynamite replaces it. Against this vivid, material setting, Florentino’s promise turns the exchange into more than a report of longing: he imagines a treasure recovered from the sea and dedicated to Fermina. The letters carry a future he constructs for them while their actual reunion remains out of reach.

The Correspondence Ends

The intimacy sustained in writing cannot survive Fermina’s renewed encounter with Florentino. Seeing his glacial eyes and fear-stricken face at close range, she feels not the turmoil of love but disenchantment. She realizes that what she had nurtured for so long was a chimera, asks him to forget it, and sends Gala Placidia with a two-line letter declaring that she has understood their bond to be nothing more than an illusion. The words overturn the promises carried across the telegraph line: what had seemed binding from a distance loses its claim in the instant of recognition.

Fermina sends back not just his telegrams and verses but also dry camellias and the keepsakes that had tied the exchange to their shared history. Among them are Aunt Escolástica’s missal, pressed herbarium leaves, a tiny piece of a religious habit, saints’ medals, and the braid Fermina cut at fifteen, tied with the silk ribbon of her school uniform. She asks for her own letters and gifts in return. Florentino, on the verge of madness, writes repeatedly and tries to persuade the maid to carry his messages, but Fermina has instructed her to accept only the returned objects. The exchange that once kept communication alive is now a carefully enforced means of ending it.

The Braid and the Long Silence

Florentino returns almost everything, but withholds the braid because he wants to give it back to Fermina in person and use the meeting to speak with her. She refuses. His mother, Tránsito Ariza, fearing a decision fatal to her son, asks Fermina for five minutes; Fermina receives her only at the doorway, does not invite her inside, and does not relent. After an argument with his mother, Florentino takes the braid’s stained-glass case down from his wall, where he has displayed it like a holy relic. Tránsito returns it in a velvet box embroidered with gold thread.

The correspondence’s ending is therefore not simply the cessation of messages. Its final tokens pass back and forth while the hoped-for conversation remains impossible. Florentino never again has an opportunity to speak with Fermina alone during their many chance encounters across their long lives, until fifty-one years, nine months, and four days later, when he renews his vow of fidelity and love on her first night as a widow. In retrospect, the letters and telegrams are both the record of a youthful mutual commitment and the measure of the silence that follows: the messages once made a shared future seem attainable, while the returned braid marks the moment that future was refused.