Rain, Rain, Go Away

I don’t know why the introduction of the gringo saddened me, but it somehow signaled the introduction of a new kind of corruption, not an abstraction as Colonel Aureliano Buendia recognized when he was told that all he needed to do to get popular support was change each of his positions, but instead some concrete stereotypical American rapacity. Yes, there have been gratuitous killings and violent deaths, but all that has happened behind a scrim of unreality.

The banana company’s banana republic, with its imported workers, its barracks and its company scrip, reminds me too much of an article I read in The New Yorker a few years ago about orange growers in Florida and illegal migrant workers. While the novel is not predictive of that kind of exploitation or of the seriocomic banana republics of movies like Moon Over Parador, this part of the story keeps a place in what seems to be some sort of immutable law of economics; it reflects both what has happened in the history of labor (and in Steinbeck), and what was to follow.

Another reason I may have felt saddened is the foreshadowing of the end of Macondo in the first sentence of one of the chapters I’ve just read. The novel has been thick with foreshadowing of firing squads and deaths, but this one seems somehow more fatal, more diabolical. On top of that, the Segundo brothers and Fernanda are characters less interesting to me than those in previous generations of the Buendia family.

On the plus side of this part of the story is that Jose Arcadio’s ambiguous existence is making him more interesting. I particularly liked the part where:

“In Melquiades’ room, protected by the supernatural light, by the feeling of being invisible, he found the repose that he had not had for one single instant during his previous life, and the only fear that remains was that they would bury him alive…Free from old fears, Jose Arcadio Segundo dedicated himself then to peruse the manuscripts of Melquiades many times, and with so much more pleasure when he could not understand them. He became so accustomed to the sound of the rain, which after two months had become another form of silence, and the only thing that disturbed his solitude was the coming and going of Santa Sofia de la Piedad.” (312-313)

It is kind of sad that, in the solitude of invisibility and silence, grown decrepit in a short time, only Jose Arcadio Segundo is aware of the reality of the town square massacre.

And so we enter the last hundred pages of the last hundred years.

If I’d had a brain in my head I would have a week ago enumerated the chapters myself. Alas. In the chapter that began on p. 315 it rained. For four years. At the end of the chapter, it stopped. And it didn’t rain again for ten years.

While it rained Gerineldo Marquez died, Aureliano Segundo spent a lot of time showing Aureliano Jose and Ursula Amaranta the encyclopedias, then he stopped and dug and dug and dug for the treasure that Ursula had buried in the backyard for the man who would come to reclaim it from his old statue of St. Joseph.

In Beowulf at the Beach, Jack McGuigan includes his favorite sentence or passage from each book he discusses. For this one, it has to be Fernanda’s singsong buzzing, a sentence that takes pages and fits perfectly her character and the general character of ranting.

This chapter contains a lot of foreshadowing, all the things that people are going to do after the rain stops (Ursula is waiting to die). On p. 330-331:

“The wooden houses, the cool terraces for breezy card-playing afternoons, seemed to have blown away in an anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe Macondo off the face of the earth.”

I should probably mention that Mr. Brown and the banana company have been given godlike powers in this chapter, as the four-year rain is referred to as the rain that Mr. Brown created or the banana company hurricane.