Fermina Daza is often visible to Florentino Ariza, and Florentino often watches her; he recalls seeing her climb into the basket of the first hot air balloon launch in the city, and he passes his own life noticing the imperceptible shifts in her behavior and temperament. One year, he is unable to find her; he drives by her house and he waits outside the church, but Fermina Daza appears to have disappeared. He hears that she is dying of consumption at a hospital in Panama, but in fact, she has gone to stay with her cousin Hildebranda because Urbino has had an affair with a woman he met at the hospital.

Fermina Daza discovers the affair when smelling her husband’s clothes, and she finally confronts him after months of pain. He is madly in love with a woman named Barbara Lynch, who is a Doctor of Theology and the daughter of a Protestant minister. Urbino has the affair because he is looking for someone who understands him; in his old age, “all the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearance in his body” (242) and he struggles to understand himself.