. Spinning .

Gabriel Garcia Marquez just has a way with making the mundane exciting.  His characters are carefully drawn out–I can imagine him sitting there thinking about them until he has someone whom he knows the reader will want to think about.  Not understand, mind you, but definitely think about. 

I’m about seventy pages into the book, past the first chapter and into some backstory but I couldn’t stop reading long enough to sit and review it.  But this, the description of the main character of the first chapter, Dr. Juvenal Urbino is an example of the care that is taken:

His eightieth birthday had been celebrated the year before with an official three-day jubilee, and in his thank-you speech he had once again resisted the temptation to retire.  He had said:  "I’ll have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans."  Although he heard less and less with his right ear, and leaned on a silver-handled cane to conceal his faltering steps, he continued to wear a linen suit, with a gold watch chain across his vest, as smartly as he had in his younger years.  His Pasteur beard, the color of mother-of-pearl, and his hair, the same color, carefully combed back with a neat part in the middle, were faithful expressions of his character.  (p. 5)

Now knowing that the suit is white (and dressed in white linen with a vest and a soft hat and cordovan boots - p.9), I imagine him looking somewhat like the Colonel of Kentucky Fried Chicken.  But there is that air of old-time elegance and class.  There is a meticulousness about him that tells by his dress that would extend beyond and into an integral part of his personality. 

But what is Marquez saying about Dr. Urbino in marking his appearance as "faithful expressions of his character?"  Marquez certainly wants us to go back and reread this short passage to come to understand the man.  In 100 Years of Solitude, Marquez did not give us such physical descriptions and yet we came to picture the characters, mainly by their behavior and their eccentricities.  I believe that he is doing the same here, but in the reverse.  Imagine, and therefore, know.

Though I didn’t mention it, my amazon.com order came in yesterday and I’ve already added and moved around things on my reading list (lower right sidebar) to reflect the changes.  It’s tough to stay away from them and I did some peeking, but Marquez was ordered specifically to read along with a buddy; Mark of Clearwater Reflections is going to read it as well now.  We’ll be starting in a couple of days so look for some good literary argument.  You’re all invited to join on in!

This should be fun!

I feel as if I am letting myself down in not producing an overall picture of this novel.  It has been with me (more so than I with it) for a month or more, and one that I had delved deeply into.  The ending was so dramatic, so skillfully built in arc that I would almost draw a curve that  rose and rose and didn’t fall gradually but smashed instead and dropped in an explosion onto page four hundred forty-eight. 

Concurrently with this reading, my reality has been in varied states of conflict, and so the story of this solitude was fully realized by one who saw it not as jail or coffin, but a holding room I’d thought I had abandoned.  This coloring of the meaning is a selfish taking of the text to heart instead of clearminded analysis of story, and to pretend otherwise would be difficult if not distorted. 

One thing that I would note is that with the use of surrealism, Marquez has exorcised the horror of situations that are more graphic than McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in detail.  Yet, if we come to accept the unreality as part of the whole, it becomes acceptable, near emotionless in response.  Perhaps, we become encased in a protective solitude of our own. After all, we didn’t cringe in reading of the wicked stepmother as she pinched the chubby cheeks of Hansel and Gretel in preparing them for dinner. 

Barthes would be proud of my involvement.  But sharing what is just personal reflection is not of any value.  So I leave it now, close the book and move along.  I know I’ll pick it up again in better days.

I need more time to come to grips with the powerful ending, fable-like and maybe moralistic, and as a point, must have had those of you who’ve read the book tittering with the "I know something you don’t" smugness at my feeble efforts to assign meanings that were so far off from what Marquez states so clearly in the end. 

"…because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."  (p. four-forty-eight)

Aureliano Babilonia and his aunt (although they are unaware of this particular connection) Amaranta Ursula are the last of their line, tied together by a lust that becomes a love.  She is carrying his child, and when their son is born, he is marked with the "tail of a pig" that Ursula always worried about with the incestuous relationships that were sprinkled throughout the history, as well as the offspring born of whores and lovers.  I remember even as a child being warned by nuns about anothing as close or closer than first-cousin matings.  There was even one married first-cousin couple within our church who’d suffered the heartbreak of their son confined to a wheelchair and his death before he hit the age of eighteen.  And their daughter, who was most likely perfectly normal but suffered whispers of her oddly round large head. 

All friends are gone, all Buendias dead, (SPOILER:  including Amaranta Ursula in childbirth, and the newborn babe, carried off by ants as Aureliano roars his loss of his beloved Amaranta and forgets the baby back at home) and the parchments of Melquiades, as suspected, are in truth the history, past through future of the Buendias and Macondo.  They forecast and are destroyed along with Aureliano just as he finds he can decipher them. 

And I see love, the caring and touching of each other and mankind, the key to breaking the solitude they each have self-imposed and constructed carefully around themselves.   Aureliano discovers it too late:

"Aureliano did not understand until then how much he loved his friends, how much he missed them, and how much he would have given to be with them at that moment. He put the child in the basket that his mother had prepared for him, covered the face of the corpse (Amaranta) with a blanket, and wandered aimlessly through the town, searching for an entrance that went back to the past."  (p. four-forty-three)

With most of the town abandoned, his old haunts and acquaintances gone, he commiserates with a bartender:

"The bartender spoke to him about the misfortune of his arm.  Aureliano spoke to him about the misfortune of his heart, withered and somewhat crumpled for having been raised against his sister.  They ended up weeping together and Aureliano felt for a moment that the pain was over.  But when he was alone again in the last dawn of Macondo, he opened up his arms in the middle of the square, ready to wake up the whole world, and he shouted with all his might:

‘Friends are a bunch of bastards!’ "  (p. four-forty-four)

There are reasons that we read and must often go back:  Did we catch that "he was alone again in the last dawn of Macondo?"  We do find that it is indeed the end, as foretold by Melquides and exactly as Aureliano reads of it. 

But why is Aureliano not a saving grace because of his ability to love and understand?  I would have expected that, a turn-around of history.  This then smacks of destiny, even to the tune of a given amount of time–one hundred years–and while he, the end of his line, must bear the suffering in the knowing and the loving, he is too late, his fate is sealed.  And, I realize that while I have integrated the story into my own thoughts of death and any sort of afterlife, Marquez has dashed my hopes of complicity in his final words:  "…because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

Even as Aureliano, free of his solitude of soul remains the solitary Buendia left to understand and read the history of his family–and here, a strange surrealistic note that while it may be linearly written, (i.e., "he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death." ), Marquez also notes that it "was based on the fact that Melquiades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant."

Goodness, a touch of Jorge Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths here. 

As the winds threaten, as Aureliano reads, anxious to get to that final part, the end of him, the end comes as foretold.  There is a play of time warp that Marquez uses.  His great-great grandmothers, Ursula and the mistress Pilar, have reached ages well beyond normal range by nearly double.  These two are the threads that weave the men, the children together through the century.  Yet even they are alone in their own solitudes, their love still not enough, or of the right kind, to save the generations and their lives. 

Nor evidently, their souls except as ghosts allowed to walk the rooms in helplessness to overturn that which was written and would come to be.

I liked it.  It was a good book. 

This two or three hours’ sleep sucks big time.  Yes, I have finished 100 Years, but I need go back because the pace picked up, the thirst for closure overtook my patient analytical ways.  Some great stuff that needs to be separated out and studied, though history, decay and human love is foremost in the theme, as is, of course, that certain solitude we each may seek and produce for ourselves.  And that’s what I cannot as easily decide–the theme, the story as a whole instead of broken down in pieces as I’ve done for the past month.  There is so much to learn, so much to turn around and twist and pull and settle back in place.  Even this, a Marquez poke at literature and education:

"In the lethargy of her pregnancy, Amaranta Ursula tried to set up a business in necklaces made out of the backbones of fish.  But except for Mercedes, who bought a dozen, she could not  find any customers.  Aureliano was aware for the first time that his gift for languages, his encyclopedic knowledge, his rare faculty for remembering the details of remote deeds and places without having been there, were as useless as the box of genuine jewelry that his wife owned, which must have been worth as much as all the money that the last inhabitants of Macondo could have put together." (p. four-thirty-eight)

For me, the backbones of fish call back the beginning of the journey, Jose Arcadio Buendia’s trek to find the sea.  The skeleton of fish reveals the loss of not only flesh (the dead) but water.  The backbone, the spine, the structure that not only holds all together in life, but remains beyond death.  Macondo?  The spirit of Buendia?  The past, picked clean by the generations of the living?

And, Aureliano’s years of study of language to enable him to read the parchments of Melquiades become as useless as the box of genuine jewelry his wife owned.  Is the knowledge gained useless unless shared, discussed and argued, maybe proven, as Aureliano used it briefly among the bookseller and his friends?  Genuine jewelry would lead me to believe it does indeed have value, and yet it’s lost without either the growing of it, or if it represents the future, or the world outside of Macondo, does it remain although Macondo turns to dereliction and dust?

There’s more, much more that I must sort through; reading and deciphering the pages as if they were the writings of Melquiades.

A writer talks to a reader, tells him a story that cannot help but include a part of himself, a way of thinking that he cannot completely escape from, even in fiction. 

"Aureliano continued getting together in the afternoon with the four arguers, whose names were Alvaro, German, Alfonso, and Gabriel, the first and last friends that he ever had in his life.  For a man like him, holed up in written reality, those stormy sessions that began in the bookstore and ended at dawn in the brothels were a revelation.  It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people…"  (p. four hundred sixteen)

In revealing a character, Marquez reveals his own view of human nature, instills in each the touch of this or that which makes us all unique, and at the same time, the same.  We all lust, but some get a tablespoon more of this element than others.  We all have fear, measured out and weighed against our strength and audacity.  Is this what Aureliano has learned locked in Melquiade’s room since shortly after the loss of Jose Arcadio Segundo?  Or are we learning something that Marquez himself is willing to share with us from his own experience as a writer.  What else about Aureliano–this latest son of Meme as well as all the Aurelianos before him, the Jose Arcadios as well–is pure Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

Much, I’m sure.  But the skill is in that with only forty pages to the end of 100 Years of Solitude, I am only questioning that now.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez must have gotten quite a few bellylaughs from the dissection of his novels over the years, and God in His mercy may he never see mine.

As the Buendia family is whittled down to the last precious few, I have sought meaning, perhaps even confirmation of my own beliefs in life, death, and the Holy Hereafter from what–a novel? But as readers it is our job. 

First, Fernanda, the last "lady of the house":

"So that he (Aureliano) went back to his enclosure, reading and rereading the parchments and listening until very late at night to Fernanda sobbing in her bedroom.  One morning he went to light the fire as usual and on the extinguished ashes he found the food that he had left for her the day before.  Then he looked into her bedroom and saw her lying on the bed covered with the ermine cape, more beautiful than ever and with her skin turned into an ivory casing.  Four months later, when Jose Arcadio arrived, he found her intact."  (p. three-ninety two)

So Fernanda, having found life–although still not willing to reach out to the living around her–lies in her solitary coffin of skin and sarcophagus of furs, peacefully released from her duties and free to lie there like the queen she always knew that she was.

Jose Arcadio, who never really did stay in the seminary as he insisted to Fernanda, comes home, kisses her brow, has her buried, and immediately sets out to find the buried gold that Ursula had so carefully hidden for the proper owner to find.  He is upset to see that it is not directed in his mother’s will, and they happen upon it quite by accident, though he is clearly unwilling to have anything to do with his nephew, the young Aureliano, bastard son of his sister Meme.  He lives out a near-Michael Jackson fantasy with bringing young children into the house, gameplaying and extremely dubious goings-on.  The house is nearly destroyed by the revelers and he expels all the children, but one day there is an anxious knock on the door:

"It was a dark old man with large green eyes that gave his face a ghostly phosporescence and with a cross of ashes on his forehead.  His clothing in tatters, his shoes cracked, the old knapsack on his shoulder his only  baggage, he looked like a beggar, but his bearing had a dignity that was in frank contradiction to his appearance.  It was only necessary to look at him once, even in the shadows of the parlor, to realize that the secret strength that allowed him to live was not the instinct of self-preservation but the habit of fear.  It was Aureliano Amador, the only survivor of Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s seventeen sons, searching for a respite in his long and hazardous existence as a fugitive."  (p. four-ninety two)

And believe me, I still wasn’t ready for this one:  Jose Arcadio and Aureliano do not recognize him, do not remember, and throw him back out into the street.  Here Marquez toys with us, foregoing the expected, or what we have learned may possibly be expected from Marquez even by going far into the offbeat, to twist us again and make us snort with laughter:

"Then they both saw from the doorway the end of a drama that had begun before Jose Arcadio had reached the age of reason.  Two policemen who had been chasing Aureliano Amador for years, who had tracked him like bloodhounds across half the world, came out from among the almond trees on the opposite sidewalk and took two shots with their Mausers which neatly penetrated the cross of ashes." 

Ya gotta appreciate this from an author.  All loose ends are being tied up.  No finger-pointing at the loss of narrative structure.  Hah!  And you though Marquez would have forgotten he left Aureliano Amador escaping the slaughter and leave us to guess that he’d died of old age in the woods?  And the punctuation point of the ashen cross bullseye? 

Such finesse, such perfection.  Yet I still haven’t figured that one out.  The household sanctuary now tainted and lost to all?  Certainly a change in the magic of the house, the life left in its sole two inhabitants…oh wait a moment, another one bites the dust:

"One September morning, after having coffee in the kitchen with Aureliano, Jose Arcadio was finishing his daily bath when through the openings in the tiles the four children he had expelled from the house burst in.  Without giving him time to defend himself, they jumped into the pool fully clothed, grabbed him by the hair, and held his head under the water until the bubbling of his death throes ceased on the surface and his silent and pale dolphin body slipped down to the bottom of the fragrant water.  Then they took out the three sacks of gold from the hiding place which was known only to them and their victim.   It was such a rapid, methodical, and brutal action that it was like a military operation."  (p. four hundred four)

Ursula’s insistance that the rightful owner only be allowed to claim the gold she’d found in the statues and buried has perhaps overtaken the wrongful use of it by Jose Arcadio. 

And this:  It was such a rapid, methodical, and brutal action that it was like a military operation."  The intense ghost of Colonel Aureliano Buendia perhaps leading the attack?  Is there something Marquez is telling us here?  Are the dead trying to teach the living things that they only realized shortly before their own deaths?  Maybe, because there is this last close to this chapter:

"Aureliano, shut up in his room, was not aware of anything.  That afternoon, having missed him in the kitchen, he looked for Jose Arcadio all over the house and found him floating on the perfumed mirror of the pool, enormous and bloated and still thinking about Amaranta.  Only then did he understand how much he had begun to love him." (p. four-hundred four)

Here Marquez seems to have doubly reiterated what we have learned from the deaths of Ursula, Fernanda, and many of the others; the importance of love.

One more thought on Marquez and the way he deals death–which naturally, if you’re dealing with the span of one hundred years in the history of a family, you need do–is the reappearance of some of the characters as "ghosts" although they are not called such.  The line above regarding the dead Jose Arcadio clearly states, " enormous and bloated and still thinking about Amaranta."  This implies that the dead are capable of still thinking.  Thus, whether in a religious context of the spirit–although this family does not seem particularly religious, and Marquez, I am guessing, is Christian-raised if not out-and-out Catholic–or in a belief of history itself continuing to be alive, it denotes a sense of the spirual world beyond the trials and tribulations of the present.  Is it an afterlife, or merely the past?  Does Melquiades gradually and finally fade from the scene because he, as the "Ghost of Christmas Future" has no more to offer to the Buendias, or all of Macondo itself?

Fernanda, widowed by Aureliano Segundo, her children in a convent, a seminary, a school, alone now with Aureliano, the illegitimate son of her elder daughter, retreats back within herself when she finds no one to to immediately work for, no one to immediately blame.  She dons the robe and crown she wore as the Festival Queen when she first visited Macondo. 

"Anyone who could have seen her in front of the mirror, in ecstacy over her own regal gestures, would have had reason to think that she was mad.  But she was not.  She had simply turned the royal regalia into a device for her memory.  The first time that she put it on she could not help a knot from forming in her heart and her eyes filling with tears because at the moment she smelled once more the odor of shoe polish on the boots of the officer who came to get her at her house to make her a queen, and her soul brightened with the nostalgia of her lost dreams.  she felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of the roses at dusk, and even the bestial nature of the parvenus.  Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without srain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.  The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her.  She became human in her solitude."  (p. 392)

How unfortunately true of so many of us.  We see too late that the heartbreak in dealing with honesty and the honest flawed humanness of others is better than living within a cell of self-deception, using words to fend off those who approach, burying our disappointment in avoidance, work, dedication to interests that comfort us more than the touch of a hand on a shoulder. 

And then, to discover it and allow it to soften our soul, even if still in a self-centered sense of what we have lost to our stubborn shells of protection, the poignant horrible loss must be born in that same sterile, inpenetrable shell all alone.

The rain of four years, eleven months and two days has devastated Macondo.  Ursula has survived it, and the sun has revived her–as it does me–as a shot of adrenalin that sends her around the house repairing damage and desolation.  But she can only do so much, and sinks back into her age, forgetting who’s who, forgiving the children for using her like a dress-up doll while she was broken in her solitude of decrepitude, and as suspected, she dies. Rebecca, still a recluse in her own home dies.

The second flood wiping out the wicked?  A promise unkept by God Himself?  A scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds after Ursula dies.  A strange half man, half cloven-hoofed creature discovered and hung from a tree.  Oddities, symbols, signs.

Able to board the ark to survival, Fernanda, Amaranta Ursula, and the bastard son of Meme, Aureliano as well as Santa Sofia de la Piedad.

Aureliano Segundo has managed to assure Amaranta Ursula’s education in Brussels by raffling off the land in his own burst of energy and renewed interest in family. And soon after,Jose Arcadio Segundo after a brief open-door policy with the household dies within his little solitary room.  At the same moment, his twin Aureliano Segundo dies as well.

"The bodies were placed in identical coffins, and then it could be seen that once more in death they had become as identical as they had been until adolescence.  aureliano Segundo’s old carousing comrades laid on his casket a wreath that had a purple ribbon with the words: Cease, cows, life is short.  Fernando was so indignant with such irreverence that she had the wreath thrown into the trash heap.  In the tumult of the last moment, the sad drunkards who carried them out of the house got the coffins mixd up and buried them in the wrong graves."  (p. 380)

Strangely sad, that the Segundo twins, possibly switched indenties in youth, switched again at death.  Their final small enclosures of solitary confinement not even their own, but maybe in fact, where they rightfully belong.

And so the next generation leaves Macondo in the midst of its reawakening from the rains that held it suspended, as if the showers of the heavens needed to wash and wash and wash away the layers of changes to return it to some former sense of innocence. 

It is a pleasure for a learning writer to recognize some of the skills practiced to perfection within the pages of a novel.  One of my own writing flaws, that of the run-on sentence, has been played with and twisted into an art form by Cormac McCarthy by forcing it to serve a purpose in pacing, and I’ve just crowned Gabrial Garcia Marquez as the record holder of the longest sentence I believe I’ve ever read.  It starts on page 348 and ends on page 350, two full pages of a single sentence.

How does he manage this?  Well, I have seen it done before, but it is relating the thoughts of Fernanda as she bitches and complains about how her life within the Buendia family is well below that which she expected as righfully her due.  Yes, a non-stop diatribe listing her undeserved troubles.  Obviously, just the length of the sentence confirms the tedium of Fernanda’s complaining "voice."

Action can be built slowly and steadily through the use of a long sentence.  It can be immediate and urgent through the use of short staccato bursts of very short. minimal but action worded sentences.  Structure is a tool.

And so I smugly sit back and realize that I can once again run-off in a long string of words unpunctuated by the jerking effect of periods but allowed instead to weave and twist through story, allowing for a breath, to build once more to apex of a matter that is just as important in the tone and speed presented as the information given.  BUT, it need be for a purpose, matched and suited to the action.

I feel I want to write, to practice this freely, as a child oblivious to all but the immediate moment.  Free to leave the bike out in the driveway, irresponsible until as Mother Editor I see the bike and bring it safely home.

Finally, someone else writing about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and with the bonus of touching upon the magical realism aspect just as I am as well.  Read Daniel Green’s (The Reading Experience) "Necessitating Judgment" and his reference to Adam Kirsch’s review in the New York Sun on Marquez’s latest,  "Memories of My Melancholy Whores."

"It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days."  (p. three-thirty-nine)

And so there is a plague of sorts upon the village of Macondo.  And everyone awaits the "clearing."  Aureliano Segundo moves out of his mistress, Petra Cotes’ home and back to Fernanda, but only as a waiting for the rain to stop.  Then, when he needs his clothes, he goes back and remains, again waiting for the clearing.  Ursula seems to wait to die, as she watches the funeral  procession of Colonel Gerineldo Marquez go by the house:

" ‘ Good-bye, Gerineldo, my son,’ she shouted.  ‘Say hello to my people and tell them I’ll see them when it stops raining.’ "  (p. three-forty-five)

Why the dependency upon the weather, although indeed it is not only odd in itself for it’s duration, but for its unusuality in Macondo. Aureliano Segundo’s wealth is destroyed as his livestock drowns, left to the care of Petra Cotes who copes as best she can.  Back home, the Buendia income dwindles as do the food supplies.

One thinks immediately of the ark, and God’s determination to cleanse and rebuild the world.  But that was rain for forty days and forty nights.  This is "four years, eleven months and two days."  What is the significance of this time period that Marquez is so precise about?  Being mathematical minded, I of course tried to make something of it.  Approximately 1795 days.  Means nothing that way, unless I’m missing an algebraic formula. 

So then, it means something metaphorically, or symbolically, or perhaps, just one of those "definite" facts thrown in to add credence to a lie, one of those "of course" moments we add as proof to our tall tales and hope no one questions.  A storyteller’s trick, and certainly one that Marquez is capable of using.

Meanwhile, as I read on, I’m sure I’ll come back to this as little hints and clues add their insight.

As a young boy, Aureliano Segundo asks Ursula to see the locked room where Melquiades had stayed and had written tomes of undecipherable (to most) words:

"He demanded so much, promised with such insistence that he would not mistreat the things, that Ursula gave him the keys.  No one had gone into the room again since they had taken Melquiades’ body out and had put on the door a padlock whose parts had become fused together with rust.  But when Aureliano Segundo opened the windows a familiar light entered that seemed accustomed to lighting the room every day and there was not the slightest trace of dust or cobwebs, with everything swept and clean, better swept and cleaner than on the day of the burial, and the ink had not dried up in the inkwell nor had oxidation diminished the shine of the metals nor had the embers gone out under the water pipe where Jose Arcadio Buendia had vaporized mercury.  On the shelves were the books bound in a cardboard-like material, pale, like tanned human skin, and the manuscripts were intact.  In spite of the room’s having been shut up for many years, the air seemed fresher than in the rest of the house."  (p. 199)

When Meme, on a visit home from the convent, brings along 68 classmates and 4 nuns:

"When they finally left, the flowers were destroyed, the furniture broken, and the walls covered with drawings and writing, but Fernanda pardoned them for all of the damage because of her relief at their leaving.  She returned the borrowed beds and stools and kept the seventy-two chamberpots in Melquiades’ room.  The locked room, about which the spiritual life of the house revolved in former times, was known from that time on as the ‘chamberpot room.’ "  (p. 280)

To this, when Jose Arcadio Segundo is awaiting the troops’ invasion of the house, and their breaking into this little room where he has been in hiding.  The officer forces open the door:

"The officer had it opened and flashed the beam of the lantern over it, and Aureliano Segundo and Santa Sofia de la Piedad saw the Arab eyes of Jose Arcadio Segundo at the moment when the ray of light passed over his face and they understood that it was the end of one anxiety and the beginning of another which would find relief only in resignation.

" (…) There was the same pureness in the air, the same clarity, the same respite from dust and destruction that Aureliano Segundo had known in childhood and that only Colonel Aureliano Buendia could not perceive.  But the officer was only interested in the chamberpots.

" ‘How many people live in this house?’ he asked.

" ‘Five.’

"The officer obviously did not understand.  He paused with his glance on the space where Aureliano Segundo and Santa Sofia de la Piedad were still seeing Jose Arcadio Segundo and the latter also realized that the soldier was looking at him without seeing him.  Then he turned out the light and closed the door.  When he spoke to the soldier, Aureliano Segundo understood that the young officer had seen the room with the same eyes as Colonel Aureliano Buendia."  (p. 334)

The power of Melquiades extends beyond his life.  The manuscripts he left are eventually read by Jose Arcadio Segundo who never leaves the room, taking his meals through the window and filling up all seventy-two chamberpots. 

Why does the room remain fresh and clean through the years?  Why do only two people see it differently–Colonel Aureliano Buendia and the office come to arrest Jose Arcadio Segundo?  What is the magic force that renders him invisible to that officer and ensures his safety? 

This one’s a real toughie.  I must consider the "space" of the room, its center in the Buendia house and yet kept pristine, a sanctuary from the world and apart as well from the space of time.  Is it all of history enclosed within its confines, or is it the future?  Jose Arcadio Segundo is content in the room, sees Colonel Buendia as a fake and finds some intense reading of the old parchments of Melquiades. 

"On the shelves were the books bound in a cardboard-like material, pale, like tanned human skin,.."  Is this symbolic of humanity, the book of life that mankind writes as he lives it?

Strange, this lone cell of solitude that is untouched by the drama that goes on immediately around it, where all are in separate cells of their own mental making as restricting as walls of stone.

Marquez is a master of weaving fantasy into a novel of realism to hold the reader’s interest, allow him to accept or interpret, yet at the same time, doubt the credibility of our narrator.  Is he speaking metaphorically?  Is he telling us a story thinly veiled in parables?  Is he an out-and-out liar?

One of the magical forces in 100 Years of Solitude that permeates the book long after his physical absence is the gypsy, Melquiades.  He had a strong influence on Jose Arcadio Buendia, bringing him the wonders of the progressing world beyond Macondo in its early days.  It may have been more than just inventions and technology, it may in fact have been the symbolic "future."

(Oops!  Gotta go look up the reference excerpts.  I’ll be right back…)

Haven’t read too much further, as the Buendias are about to enter a new era, but have been concentrating on the somewhat magical room of Melquiades that seems to be viewed in two different ways, and by Jose Arcadio Segundo’s run-in with the law, and his escape into pure solitude. 

There are some pretty heavy duty metaphors here ( I think, for all I know, Marquez is simply telling a tale and has not considered them at all!), and the first one I’ll start with here is the train ride:

"When Jose Arcadio Segundo came to he was lying face up in the darkness.  He realized that he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood and that all his bones ached.  He felt an intolerable desire to sleep.  Prepared to sleep for many hours, safe from the terror and the horror, he made himself comfortable on the side that pained him less, and only then did he discover that he was lying against dead people.  There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle.

"(…)Trying to flee from the nightmare, Jose Arcadio Segundo dragged himself from one car to another in the direction in which the train was heading, and in the flashes of light that broke through the wooden slats as they went through sleeping towns he saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be throuwn into the sea like rejected bananas. 

"(…) When he got to the first car he jumped into the darkness and lay beside the tracks until the train had passed.  it was the longest one he had ever seen, with almost two hundred freight cars and a locomotive at either end and a third one in the middle."  (p. three hundred twenty-nine)

This brings to my mind the endless rooms of Jose Arcadio Buendia.  Is the chain of railroad cars Jose Segundo’s life journey?  His great grandfather, in his final dream, had returned to the middle room, believing himself to be back at the beginning.  Jose Segundo walks through the cars full of the dead to the front car, heading with the train’s movement away from Macondo.  Therefore, going further than he would have gone had he gone backwards, or jumped from where he was somewhere along the line.  I see this as intention to understand his beginning, to go through it again, just as his grandfather usually returned to the first room he entered in his dreams. 

Or, as I say, it could mean nothing deeper at all.  But there is meaning in the room of Melquiades.  I shall get to that later.