To hell with a fan when the wind is blowing

“To hell with a fan when the wind is blowing” is Fermina Daza’s terse declaration of intellectual freedom, a maxim that changes meaning as her life changes. First it marks her resistance to the conventions of her new world; later, recalled against her accommodation to those conventions, it exposes the cost of preserving social standing and hard-won privilege.

The Maxim and Its Context

The phrase appears during the period when Fermina has submitted to studying the harp, a concession to the expectations of her husband’s family. Doña Blanca had insisted that a respectable woman should play the piano. Juvenal Urbino, remembering the childhood years he himself had spent under the burden of piano lessons, persuaded his mother to accept the harp instead. A magnificent instrument was brought from Vienna, and Fermina began lessons with a celebrated teacher from Mompox, who died two weeks after arriving; she continued with a musician from the seminary.

Fermina regards her compliance as an effort to avert catastrophe, but recognizes that she has become entangled in the conventions and prejudices of her new life more quickly than she expected. Against that accommodation, the maxim had served as a ritual assertion of freedom of thought: when circumstances already offer what is needed, the apparatus meant to compensate for its absence is pointless. Its breezy defiance is sharpened by the fact that she is now enduring an elaborate lesson in obedience.

Freedom and Social Accommodation

The phrase does not describe an unchanging independence. Fermina grows jealous of the privileges she has secured and fearful of embarrassment and scorn; she is willing to endure humiliation in the hope that God will take pity on Doña Blanca, who repeatedly prays for death. The maxim’s force lies in that contrast: the woman who once used it to affirm freedom increasingly accepts burdens imposed by her new social world.

Her marriage also places her between opposing classes in a city that still dreams of the return of the Viceroys. Juvenal regards matrimony as an institution requiring continual effort, while Fermina’s harp lessons make that abstract difficulty concrete: domestic convention reaches into her time, conduct, and education. The saying thus recalls not a simple escape from convention, but the narrower freedom she once claimed before privilege and fear made accommodation seem necessary.

A Retrospective Measure

The maxim’s remembered role gives it a meaning beyond the immediate dispute over an instrument. It preserves the voice of Fermina’s earlier self, even as the narrative records how quickly that self was drawn into the customs of her new milieu. The wind in the saying stands for circumstances already present; the fan, for the imposed performance of propriety. In the period of the harp, however, Fermina does not simply discard the fan. Her conduct reveals the tension between a remembered ideal of independence and the compromises through which she protects her position.