One Hundred Years of Solitude, Again, p. 202-272

In the chapter that begins on page 203, Marquez offers a couple of perspectives on the nature of solitude.

Regarding Aureliano Segundo, who found solitude in his father’s workshop and in his conversations with Melquiades, only to be drawn away from it by Petra Cotes into a life of get, squander, get:

“Nature had made him reserved and withdrawn, with tendencies toward solitary
meditation…” (203)

Contrast this with Rebeca, so forgotten about by everyone else that she is thought to be dead even while she still lives in the house she had shared with Jose Arcadio Buendia. She spurns Aureliano Triste’s desire to rent her house, and the narrator tells us that when Aureliano Segundo offers to bring her into the Buendia home, that:

“his good intentions were frustrated by the firm intransigence of Rebeca, who
had needed many years of suffering and misery in order to attain the privileges
of solitude and who was not disposed to renounce them in exchange for an old age
disturbed by the false attraction of charity.” (219-220)

Page 222 (end of one chapter) and page 223 (beginning of another)seem at first glance to be a critical turning point, which would make sense, given its position in the middle of the novel. On one hand, Aureliano Triste opens the ice factory that the original Jose Arcadio Buendia had imagined. Once Aureliano Triste is joined by Aureliano Centeno, their ability to produce a surplus of ice sparks the idea of a railroad. Marquez foreshadows:

“The innocent yellow train that was to bring as many ambiguities and
certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes,
calamities, and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo…” (222)

The changes take place in the form of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ technologies of reproduction: movies, the phonograph, the telephone. I absolutely love the way Marquez characterizes this progress as it concerns Macondo:

“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and
was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between
excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no
one knew for certain where reality lay.” (224)

If that little piece of irony isn’t delightful enough, Marquez follows with this sentence:

“It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of Jose
Arcadio Buendia under the chestnut tree with impatience and made him wander all
through the house even in broad daylight.”

As much as Marquez has presented unreality as reality, we are confronted with the things we think of as real as things that call reality into question, and then the ghost awakens, and that’s supposed to be the real reality. Beautiful.

So anyway, Macondo is back to reality with the wandering ghost of Jose Arcadia Buendia. Then, with Mr. Brown, a new gringo character:

“He was in the captive-balloon business, which had taken him halfway around the
world with excellent profits, but he had not succeeded in taking anyone up in
Macondo because they considered that invention backward after having seen and
tried the gypsy’s flying carpets.” (225)

Now for some speculation about the timing of the novel. It takes place sometime between the invention of the daguerrotype, which off the top of my head means 1840ish, and to this midway point, it must be about 1920 if the motion picture has reached the swampland of Colombia. Yet my sense of time is once again frustrated when I am presented with the fact that, on p. 246:

“…a dying Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who after so much war and so much suffering
from it was still not fifty years of age.”

Given all that had happened, and as many generations as have seemed to appear, I thought he was at least seventy. It particularly surprises me on page 250, when Pilar Ternera is described as “also almost a hundred years old.” The “also” refers to Ursula, who has just drawn the conclusion that Aureliano’s crying in the womb was a sign of his incapacity for love. Anyway, what this means is that Pilar Ternera is more than fifty years older than Aureliano. Which means that she was almost seventy when she first seduced the teenage Aureliano.

Back to Ursula, and to the idea of solitude: she is blind and her body is failing her. Marquez writes:

“Nevertheless, in the impenetrable solitude of decrepitude she had such
clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family
that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former
times had prevented her from seeing.” (248)

A couple of other things:

Here is the description of Amaranta’s solitude:

“Amaranta seemed to carry the cross of ashes of virginity on her forehead.
In reality, she carried it on her hand in the black bandage, which she did not
take off even to sleep and which she washed and ironed herself. Her life
was spent in weaving her shroud. It might have been said that she wove
during the day, and unwove during the night, and not with any hope of defeating
solitude that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it.” (258-259)

A nice little twist on Penelope and her suitors, except that Amaranta doesn’t reject her suitors because of her faith in her true love; heck, she has even rejected her true love, if Pietro Crespi and/or Gerindeldo Marquez can fit in that category.

On page 267, Aureliano Buendia dies.

On page 272, Aureliano Segundo’s companionship with Meme, the sort of wayward daughter, “freed him for a time from the bitter solitude of his revels.”