. Spinning .

Very very strange stuff happening.  The banana company workers go on strike, led in force by Jose Arcadio Segundo, and the military is called into the town.  After several attempts at compromise, a meeting is called for the workers to gather at the train station in the center of town to hear the words of the elected arbiters:

"It had been signed by General Carlos Cortes Vargas and his secretary, Marjor Enrique Garcia Isaza, and in three articles of eighty words he declared the strikers to be a ‘bunch of hoodlums’ and he authorized the army to shoot to kill.

"After the decree was read, in the midst of a deafening hoot of protest, a captain took the place of the lieutenant on the roof of the station and with the horn he signaled that he wanted to speak.  The crowd was quiet again.

" ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the captain said in a low voice that was slow and a little tired, ‘you have five minutes to withdraw.’ "  (p. 327)

The slaughter begins and ends for Jose Arcadio Segundo in a train packed with bodies of the dead.  He is not badly injured and jumps from the train in the night to make his way back home to Macondo.  He stops along the way at a home where he is fed and cleaned:

"Jose Arcadio Segundo did not speak until he had finished drinking his coffee.

" ‘There must have been three thousand of them,’ he murmured.

" ‘What?’

" ‘The dead," he clarified.  ‘It must have been all of the people who were at the station.’

"The woman measured him with a pitying look.  ‘There haven’t been any dead here,’ she said.  ‘Since the time of your uncle, the colonel, nothing has happened in Macondo.’ " (p. 331)

And it gets even stranger.  Jose Arcadio Segundo makes it safely home and is hidden out in Melquiades’ old room.  It rains.  He remains in the room, unseen by all but his mother, Sofia.  Even when the military, still loose in the town and rounding out rebel workers and taking them away by cover of night, come to the Buendia house. 

Another entry on that, and more time to decipher the import of what is happening.  Jose Arcadio Segundo’s necessary reclusiveness deepens his solitude of mind.  Seals his fate to a degree, as it did that of his great-grandfather, Jose Arcadio Buendia beneath the chestnut tree.  Is it an acceptance of fate or a rejection of reality?  Odd, that the only one who seems to have seen and acknowledged the reality (in this immediate aftermath) is losing his grasp on it and returns to the strange and unintelligible writings of Melquiades.

With Meme’s lover, Mauricio Babilonia, shot in the spine beneath her window, Marquez foreshadows the child that comes of the slippery nights before that tragic evening, and of course, we expect her mother’s aghast reaction to her suspicions.  Fernanda bundles up herself and her daughter and takes off back to her own birthplace on a train ride that passes past together with present:

"the train went through a poppy-laden plain where the carbonized skeleton of the Spanish galleon still sat and then came out into the clear air alongside the frothy, dirty sea where almost a century before Jose Arcadio Buendia’s illusions had met defeat."  (p. 317)

And (to me) the dying of the hope of freedom from the family script by way of yellow butterflys that had followed Meme and her lover around:

"Much time had passed when she saw the last yellow butterfly destroyed in the blades of the fan and she admitted as an irremediable truth that Mauricio Babilonia had died." (p. 318)

Beyond the gringo housing for the banana plantation’s workers, beyond the bounds and bonds of home and territory, Fernanda brings Meme to her childhood home, dilapitated and given over to the weeds and ghosts:

"Meme knew where they were because in the fright of her insomnia she saw pass by the gentlemen dressed in black whom they delivered to the house inside a lead box on one distant Christmas Eve."  (p. 318)

And settles Meme in the one sacred, secret spot I’ve always feared:

"On the following day, after mass, Fernanda took her to a somber building that Meme recognized immediately from her mother’s stories of the convent where they had raised her to be a queen, and then she understood that they had come to the end of the journey." (p. 318)

Oh yes, this confirms my version of potential unwed Catholic motherhood:  "Hie thee to a convent!"  It dealt a greater fear (via the nuns, not my mother) than any image of a demanding, squalling infant could bring about.  Odd too, that while I’d not thought of this in decades, it should come up twice in one week, the first time in workshopping a ballad-style poem by one of our Narratives members relating the story of a young woman who becomes a nun, and my immediate question as to the possibility of her pregnancy. Or, her unloveliness, as the least likely to be pick of the litter in some Catholic families was often offered up to convent or seminary for both the assured future of the child and the assured extra indulgences and blessings the parents would receive for their sacrificial lamb.

Maybe this almost daily posting on 100 Years of Solitude isn’t such a good idea.  I seem to draw conclusions from a reading, or am struck by something, then further on I’m finding that Marquez indeed does tell me clearly what I’ve pondered over–whether right or wrong.  I also get a feel for the writing, and then he turns it around on me.  I posted a strong admiration for his giving us little narrator description of his characters, which is still true, but he pins them down eventually, often through the eyes of Ursula to confirm or modify our own estimations:

"Meme was entering a fruitful age.  She was not beautiful, as Amaranta had never been, but on the other hand she was pleasant, uncomplicated, and she had the virtue of making a good impression on people from the first moment.  She had a modern spirit that wounded the antiquated sobriety and poorly disguised miserly heart of Fernanda, and that, on the other hand, Aureliano Segunda took pleasure in developing."  (p. 292)

Amaranta, sewing a shroud both for her enemy Rebeca as well as one for herself and planning her death, is finally defined. I had wondered about her spurning of her one true love, Pietro Crespi when he seeks her out after Rebeca drops him like a hot potato in favor of Jose Arcadio, as well as her unwillingness to culminate a relationship with Colonel Gerinaldo Marquez (and it’s not a sexual dysfunction nor gender preference, as she comes close to love with her nephew, Aureliano Jose).  I thought it to be pride.  It seems to be more:

"Amaranta was too wrapped up in the eggplant patch of her memories to understand those subtle apologetics.  She had reached old age with all of her nostalgias intact.  When she listened to the waltzes of Pietro Crespi she felt the same desire to weep that she had in adolescence, as if time and harsh lessons had meant nothing.  (…) She had tried to sink them into the swampy passion that she allowed herself with her nephew Aureliano Jose, and she tried to take refuge in the calm and virile protection of Colonel Gerneldo Marquez, but she had not been able to overcome them, not even with the most desperate act of her old age when she would bathe the small Jose Arcadio three years before he was sent to the seminary and caress him not as a grandmother would have done with a grandchild, but as a woman would have done with a man, as it was said that the French matrons did and as she had wanted to do with Pietro Crespi at the age of twelve, fourteen (…).  (p. 297-8)

Amaranta’s hatred of Rebecca rivals the love she is capable of giving and has repressed.  She is indeed not the cool character spinster aunt, but a woman of deep passion who simply does not know how to act upon it.

Yeah but, what does she represent in the overall scheme of things?  She has since died, and time marches on through Meme who has had an illegitimate son from a smooth-talking banana company mechanic.  Unfortunately, he has been shot beneath her window as a chicken thief and spends the rest of his life a bedded-paraplegic when all he was trying to do was sneak into Meme’s bedroom at night. 

But I have a feeling that my trek through this book will continue as it has, reconsidering a path, doubling back, returning to a point of juncture and moving forward again via a different trail of understanding.

Nothing like sitting in a dark garage to get the mind absorbing, turning over what has been read.

Ursula said it, in speaking of Jose Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo, the twin sons of Arcadio (son of Jose Arcadio, Aureliano’s brother) and Pilar (the concubine of about half of the Buendia men): 

"Ursula reproached herself for the habit of forgetting about him (Jose Arcadio Segundo) when she spoke about the family, but when she sensed him in the house again and noticed that the colonel let him into the workshop during working hours, she reexamined her old memories and confirmed the belief that at some moment in childhood he had changed places with his twin brother, because it was he and not the other one who should have been called Aureliano."  (p. 281)

Very early on I had posted about the repetition of names, hinted at once again by Ursula, and my conclusion of the two, the Joses and Aurelianos within each generation as being two separate but repeated characters that faced the same repeated events in history but perhaps reacted differently with each generation.  The Aurelianos were closer to their father in nature, solitary, quiet, intense, dedicated to ideas, cold yet passionate in their interests, and to a degree clairvoyant as their mother/grandmother/great grandmother, Ursula.  The Joses were lusty, anxious travelers, partygoers with goldfingers (here I am referring to their knack for making money, but yes, they were good sexual partners as well).  Yet in the Segundo twins, Aureliano is the bold lustful one, and Jose the quiet and somber loner. 

There are many ways of looking at this.  It could be the dual nature of man, it could mean good versus evil, weak versus strong; it could mean more or nothing.  There is a reason for the switch, and it is important that I keep this in mind as the story continues to unravel. Perhaps with further reading it will take on new meaning, showing man’s ability to change himself, or maybe just to deceive.  As I learn Marquez’s methods, I have learned to spot his hints, pick up his guide and carry it for I will need whatever he hands me now later in the story.  This reminds me of IF or Silent Hill style narratives, where the clues/tools are discovered, are "taken", kept in inventory and used when needed as the story progresses.

At this point in the book, Colonel Aureliano Buendia has been struck dead while pissing on the chestnut tree to which his father was tied; as a matter of fact, he splatters the shoe of the ghost of Jose Arcadio in the process.  The next generation, the children of Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda are coming into their own, a little different, a little the same as their ancestors. In particular, Meme (short for Renata Remedios) is very much like her father, fun-loving and aware of the pretenses of her mother and of her father’s liaison with Petro Cotes, with whom he resides sinfully openly.

Marquez is setting me up.  I realize I must pay attention to Ursula, and to these young folk who carry on the tradition and story of the Buendia legacy of solitude.  I really, really, really need that cabin in the woods.

In a former post, Reading Deeper, there was some discussion on the meaning of Remedios the Beauty, her oddness even amidst a rather strange family, and what she may stand for in the overall complexity of 100 Years of Solitude.  Once again, I must go backward in the book even as I move ahead because I realize that something quite important has happened here, snuck in by Marquez in his usual mosquito-bite manner.  Fernanda, Amaranta, Ursula and Remedios are outside folding sheets, and Fernanda has noticed that Remedios looks pale and questions her:

"Don’t you feel well?" she asked her.

Remedios the Beauty, who was clutching the sheet by the other end, gave a pitying smile.

"Quite the opposite," she said, "I never felt better."

She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide.  Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise.  Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her."  (p. 255)

Okay, so she ascended into the sky, the heavens, whatever.  Before I get into that, I notice a whole slew of metaphors that must be reasoned out: 

"a delicate wind of light"  – Now what does that mean, for heaven’s sake?  Merely the usual accompanying sign of a miracle?

"identify the nature of that determined wind"  –  While Ursula has reached some degree of understanding that comes with her loss of physical vision, she is the only one that seems to know what’s going on, and she’s not telling.  What means "determined"?  Is it predestined?  Is it inevitable?  Are the paths we take that seem so different to each of us in fact threaded  to wind around to the same end for all?

"abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias" — Abandoning with her.  With her.  Not too clear on this point, but the choice of language seems to imply something I can’t quite grasp.  And the beetles and dahlias is a teaser.  The flower of the book thus far has been the home-based begonias.  Is the abandoning of the environment man’s loss of hope, leaving him to a continuous struggle of good and evil (flowers and bugs), beauty and that which destroys it?

"highest-flying birds of memory" — Man’s inherent nature of good, now inert?  Has mankind lost an inborn spirituality in the chaos of daily living in a developing world? 

Perhaps the biggest argument for what Remedios the Beauty represents is this ascension.  To my recollection of Bible, only Jesus and his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary ascended into heaven, body included.  Mary was born without the stigma of original sin, but (and ohmigod I hope I’m right here) Jesus was baptized in his early thirties so I think he might have born the mark just as we all supposedly do. 

Then Remedios may indeed signify purity and perfection, as well as the striving for it and the ultimate death required by lesser mortals to achieve or fail to achieve this state.  The men who have died for their (fatal) attraction to Remedios have been more than enamoured; they have lost all touch with reality in an obsessive focus on her.  And too, they have not lusted as much as been awed and dedicated and respectful.  Have they died in a state of grace?  Or have they just been "taken in" by Remedios as Colonel Aureliano Buendia believes her power to be.

Strange, that one of the minor characters in this books should become one of such great importance within both her family and the framework of the story.

Just when I thought I had it knocked, Marquez in his helpful way has just told me I am wrong.  These characters do have thoughts and emotions whereas I found them delightful, intriguing, but rather cold. 

Through the dimming vision of Ursula (the most likely candidate, a mother), we have our senses confirmed or modified of their natures:

"Even though the trembling of her hands was more and more noticeable and the wieght of her feet was too much for her, her small figure was never seen in so many places at the same time.  She was almost as diligent as when she had the whole weight of the house on her shoulders.  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."  (p. 2sixty-six)  [ed. note:  numerals  three and six don't work on this keypad]

While she is losing her eyesight, she remains stoic (as mothers do) and hides this from her family as she sees herself the lifeforce and necessary anchor of the household.  But she gives us some insight into Colonel Aureliano Buendia, as well as herself:

"She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendia had not lost his love for the family because he had been hardened by the war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone, not even his wife Remedios or the countless one-night women who had passed through his life, and much less his sons.  She sensed that he had fought so many wars not out of idealism, as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the same reason, pure and sinful pride."  (p. 2sixty-seven)

Ah yes, that’s what I thought too, the bloody bastard.  But where does this leave me with my wonderings about characters as tools?  And in particular with Marquez as writer, the meaning of the intentions that drive the characters as a deeper meaning of mankind in general? 

Needless to say, this annoys me no end; but in a good way.  I tend to worry something to death until satisfied that it is conclusive, then store it away and worry it no more.  Now I need to drag out some of those conclusions and rethink them.  Two pages read = Two days’ thinking.  But this is not a structured method that I’ll use with everything I read from now on.  For one thing, I expect to become better skilled and therefore quicker.  For another, the relativity of the Buendia family and my own current state of family is vital to understand right now.  It in fact causes doubts and sleepless nights about my own personal history and everything I thought I knew and understood.  Heavy, when everything you thought you knew about yourself, all you thought you were and were not capable of doing, changes within the perception and dynamics of family.

Of which Marquez wants nothing to do with.  He prefers to make his intrigueing symbols and metaphors bold and strong.  Remember the indelible crosses of ash on the seventeen sons of Aureliano?  Here’s what they were for:

"During the course of that week, at different places along the coast, his seventeen sons were hunted down like rabbits by invisible criminals who aimed at the center of their crosses of ash.  Aureliano Triste was leaving the house with his mother at seven in the evening when a rifle shot came out of the darkness and perforated his forehead.  Aureliano Centeno was found in the hammock that he was accustomed to hang up in the factory with an icepick between his eyebrows driven in up to the handle."  (p. 257)

And on through all, except for one, Aureliano Amador who manages to escape.  (Why, I wonder…)

Aside from the fond stirring of memories of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in recall of such bash and slash blood and guts laid out on the reading table from these last few pages, of course I ponder the meaning of the ash crosses as more than dead-center aiming points for the slaughter of all but one (aha!  remember this!) of the poor Aureliano spawn. 

So once again I am stopped and made to think.  Ten pages read in but a few minutes, but lived with for days.

Needless to say, this book shall live on my shelves forever.  May indeed, be crispy-fried along with me and buried in a tiny cherrywood coffin neath a rock out in the woods beyond my home.  Or not really this one, for this is getting tattered and I dropped it in the garage once and it hit a grease spot of some sort (he didn’t spill anything, nor did I) and I, who never put my name inside the sacred pages of a text well read and paid for, still cannot abide the stain along the edges of the hundred pages in the heart of Solitude.  As soon as I am able, I shall buy another copy, clean and unabused, untainted.

I am beginning to form a closeness with mankind and yet I feel the need to hold it at arm’s length:

"Shut up in his workshop, Colonel Aureliano Buendia thought about those changes and for the first time in his quiet years of solitude he was tormented by the definite certainty that it had been a mistake not to have continued the war to its final conclusion.  During that time a brother of the forgotten Colonel Magnifico Visbal was taking his seven-year-old grandson to get a soft drink at one of the pushcarts on the square and because the child accidentally bumped into a corporal of police and spilled the drink on his uniform, the barbarian cut him to pieces with his machete, and with one stroke he cut off the head of the grandfather as he tried to stop him.  The whole town saw the decapitated man pass by as a group of men carried him to his house, with a woman dragging the head along by its hair, and the bloody sack with the pieces of the child."  (p. 257)

What can I say?  What does Colonel Buendia say?

"One of these days," he shouted, "I’m going to arm my boys so we can get rid of these shitty gringos!"

Eloquently put, Aurie. History repeats itself.  What we’ve done to others comes back to be done to us.  Perceptions change.  Armies change.  Men switch sides and switch again until we do not know even what we know as truth.

I am feeling clownish and ridiculous in my interpretations, unworthy of analysis of this great book that I in ignorance somehow justify in applying to my own small self.  My thoughts are amateur and self-serving, and I am missing the bigger picture, the history, the meaning.

In focusing on the characters, I see their strength, and yet it is difficult to understand them.  I am beginning to doubt my perception and comprehension of them as people, but have not as yet discovered their secret, what they represent in Marquez’s mind as well as in those of higher intellect that perhaps have shared this wisdom and simple searching on our new web of life’s information would indeed repair my broken window and present the view.

"The house was suddenly filled with unknown guests, with invincible and worldly carousers, and it became necessary to add bedrooms off the courtyard, widen the dining room, and exchange the old table for one that held sixteen people, with new china and silver, and even then they had to eat lunch in shifts."

The train, the odd Mr. Herbert and his love of the bananas, the outgoing and lusty Aureliano Segundo, have all brought to Macondo a drastic change by welcoming an inflow of people from all over the world.  Amaranta is scandalized.  Fernanda is humbled.  Colonel Aureliano Buendia goes deeper into the cave of his workshop.  But Ursula simply buys more food, accomodating the different tastes of the foreigners who descend upon her home. 

These are no longer simple people with an unreal ability to adapt to upheaval of their lives that rivals the absurdities of Candide.  They stand for more than I am reading into them.  My friend Neha may be right in her assessment of character as vehicle of a greater meaning.  But I am at a loss to peel off their clothing and see the nakedness for what it is.

"Remedios the Beauty was the only one who was immune to the banana plague.  She was becalmed in a magnificent adolescence, more and more inpenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities.  She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home."

I like Remedios for her innocence and free spirit.  She cuts off her flowing hair and shaves her head.  Still, she is even more irresistible to men.  She has the lack of emotion of all the Buendias, yet remains ignorant of her powers, and while she adapts as easily as the rest, it is a leap ahead she takes to retain her self, plotted out to protect her own private sphere of solitude.

How can my feeble efforts to understand her, to understand those around her, around me, have any value to any but myself?  What am I missing in my box of tools of reading?  Am I using a hammer to smash a bubble instead of using a pin?

Admittedly there are realities that have kept me from breezing through this novel at a quicker pace, but those same realities are simultaneously changing my perception of what I am reading.  Just as a reader brings the past to his interpretation, he is affected by the present and so instills his reading with new, constantly changing and updated ideas. 

At this point in my days, 100 Years of Solitude is perhaps the perfect selection to be involved in.  I read sporadically but daily, and do not cover many pages at a time.  But the added time load assigned to a reading is taken instead by reflection, application, understanding.  I must go back and pull excerpts to illustrate my analysis and thought process (and will do so shortly), but I find myself trying to comprehend the Buendia family just as I am now doing with my own.  I feel I am missing the whole point of the novel, perhaps, by trying to imbue the characters with emotions that upon consideration and replay, are not clear except to cubicleize them into separate chunks of ice.  Will they form together an igloo I wonder? 

We are never told by Marquez how any of them feel.  We are told what they do.  The character I felt closest to was Jose Arcadio Buendia, and with his death, I feel alone.  Ice-olated.

I had been wondering about the ice that fascinated Jose Arcadio Buendia when the gypsies brought it to Macondo.  And the reference to it in the first sentence of the novel.  I am not satisfied that it had no more meaning than the eventual good fortune it brought his grandsons, although it did neatly provide an obvious reason for the railroad to be brought in, and all it brings with it.  As an aside, it did remind me of East of Eden, and Cal’s bright idea to move lettuce quickly by refrigerated cars, which of course, was a dismal failure and practically sealed his doomed efforts to prove himself to his father.

Today, I feel the ice brings more the coldness of bitter feelings, of empty starkness and immobility.  The protective bubble that is solid and inpenetrable while thought and feeling hangs suspended within.  It is insulation and distance.  I understand the ice.  It is just one more manner of solitude that disillusionment and helplessness can bring.

There is no doubt that with one hundred years to play with, Marquez need be a master at timeline in sequential, foreshadowing, backplay (my own term), and tieing everything in so that it runs as smoothly and accurately as a…well, clock.

This was just too good not to share with you:  The Buendia family is doing well in the ice business (remember Jose Arcadio Buendia’s great scheme when the gypsies brought a chunck of ice?)  Well, two things are going on:  One, Aureliano Triste decided they need to expand the business and leaves to seek the railroad coming through Macondo; two, Aureliano Centeno (another ash-crossed illegitimate son of Aureliano) has returned to help in the ice factory, and this is his contribution:

"Aureliano Triste consulted the calendar and left the following Wednesday, planning to return after the rains had passed.  There was no more news of him.  Aureliano Centeno, overwhelmed by the abundance of the factory, had already begun to experiment with the production of ice with a base of fruit juices instead of water, and without knowing it or thinking about it, he conceived the essential fundamentals for the invention of sherbet."

Don’t you just love it?  There’s Jose Arcadio Buendia surviving in the great unknown space of his grandson.  Sherbet for God’s sake! 

But Marquez brings back Aureliano Triste and spans the missing eight months he is gone in a matter of a few sentences, moving quickly to what becomes a major change in the village of Macondo, and I am sure, in the Buendia family–or maybe they don’t change all that much…

"At that moment the town was shaken by a whistle with a fearful echo and a loud, panting respiration.  During the previous weeks they had seen the gangs who were laying ties and tracks and no one paid attention to them because they throught it was some new trick of the gypsies, coming back with whistles and tambourines and their age-old and discredited song and dance about the qualities of some concoction put together by journey-man geniuses of Jerusalem.  But when they recovered from the noise of the whistles and the snorting, all the inhabitants ran out into the street and saw Aureliano Triste waving from the locomotive, and in a trance they saw the flower-bedecked train which was arriving for the first time eight months late."

Lord, the ghosts of Jose Arcadio, Melquiades, and all the rest must be laughing their asses off.

But the thing is, is that while recalling the men from the past, Marquez brings them into the present with the spirit and ideas of the sons.  And at the same time, while moving so very quickly through the present, gives us a hint of a future that will see rapid change, growth, maybe good, maybe evil.  All this, in a single event, a single catalyst:  A moving train of endless cars…like endless rooms.

The terms solitude or solitary have been coming at me fast and furious, no longer hinted at by Marquez, but given us with small examples:

"Taciturn, silent, insensible to the new breath of vitality that was shaking the house, Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with soitude.  He would get up at five in the morning after a light sleep, have his eternal mug of bitter coffee in the kitchen, shut himself up all day in the workshop, and at four in the afternoon he would go along the porch dragging a tool, not even noticing the fire of the rose bushes or the brightness of the hour or the persistence of Amaranta, whose melancholy made the noise of a boiling pot, which was perfectly perceptible at dusk, and he would sit in the street door as long as the mosquitoes would allow him to.  Someone dared to disturb his solitude once.

"How are you, Colonel," he asked in passing.

"Right here," he answered.  "Waiting for my funeral procssion to pass."  (p. 216)

So we are getting the feeling of the solitude, the aloneness each member of this odd family feels and surrounds himself with as what, protection?  Or is it just a lack of social skill, a lack of understanding each other and thus, never developing a community with mankind, but standing outside of the touch-zone while walking daily within it for a lifetime.

One of Aureliano’s seventeen sons, Aureliano Triste, marked by the ash cross on his forehead as his brothers, decides to remain in Macondo.  In seeking a separate house for himself, he stumbles upon the rundown home of Rebeca and Jose Arcadio and finds Rebeca an old woman still alive but long since forgotten by all but Amaranta, who still holds a grudge over Pietro Crespi.  Rebeca chases away Aureliano Triste with a gun, and while the family feels she should be brought into their home to be taken care of, she is adamantly resistant:

"…but 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 attractions of charity."  (p. 236)

This is one of the most telling incidents of solitude, and one I am beginning to well understand.  It is a state of mind well sought in a life filled with disappointments or traumatic and painful events that seem beyond our control, when one can no longer understand the workings of the mind and feels helpless to gain insight or benefit, yet is reluctant to accept.  There develops a need to disassociate, an acknowledgement that true understanding could indeed threaten whatever balance the mind has managed to create for itself.  It would just be too much; total loss of control appears inevitable.  This bubble that must be built is drawn, as a wand from soapy water, as first an invisible illusion, exclusion, inclusion of space.

I see the building of the house of solitude as then formed with a framework of chickenwire.

"Then Colonel Aureliano Buendia took down the bar and saw at the door seventeen men of the most varied appearance, of all types and colors, but all with a solitary air that would have been enough to identify them anywhere on earth.  They were his sons."

In this case, the mark of Buendia, the mark of Aureliano himself is the "solitary air."  And further:

"Without any previous agreement, without knowing each other, they had arrived from the most distant corners of the coast, captivated by the talk of the jubilee.  They all bore with pride the name Aureliano and the last name of their mothers.  The three days that they stayed in the house, to the satisfaction of Ursula and the scandal of Fernanda, were like a state of war.  Amaranta searched among old papers for the ledger where Ursula had written down the names and birth and baptism dates of all of them, and beside the space for each one she added his present address.  That list could well have served as a recapitulation of twenty years of war."

Here the sons of Aureliano symbolize his life and career, as well as the country in its strife and differences during that time.  And before they all leave, this:

"The Ash Wednesday before they went back to scatter out along the coast, Amaranta got them to put on Sunday clothes and accompany her to church.  More amused than devout, they let themselves be led to the altar rail where Father Antonio Isabel made the sign of the cross in ashes on them.  Back at the house, when the youngest tried to clean his forehead, he discovered that the mark was indelible and so were those of his brothers.  They tried soap and water, earth and a scrubbing brush, and lastly a pumice stone and lye, but they could not remove the crosses.  On the other hand, Amaranta and the others who had gone to mass took it off without any trouble.  "It’s better that way," Ursula stated as she said good-bye to them.  "From now on everyone will know who you are." 

How many times have I worried that this black smudge would not wash off as I headed for public high school classes.  How often did I feel guilty for even trying to wash it off, considering the reaction of my peers rather than the true meaning of this Catholic ritual.

The sons leave with one more thing, a gold fish handcrafted by their father, Aureliano, who has returned to the alchemy shop of his home.  The sign of the fish is another religious symbol, and we’re not sure why Aureliano has chosen it.  I don’t quite remember my bible–and it is perhaps time to look this up–but I believe the sign of the fish marked the solitary houses where Christians could safely meet back in the time of Jesus. 

These signs, now going out into the world via seventeen illegitimate but acknowledged sons of Aureliano conceived in only the lust of war, still reiterate the feeling of solitude.  Pride, history, yes, but solitude in their separate worlds.

I am happy to say that I think I have incorporated a couple more layers of understanding into my reading.  I can follow story, relate to it from some form of experience, find philosophical meaning, dig deeper into metaphor, still use my editing abilities to find typos, and still take delight in the techniques used by writers such as imagery, narrative structure, background, etc.

One of the things that Marquez as a skilled writer was most likely aware of as he wrote was the reader’s possible resistance to the repetition of names and words.  In coming almost close to a "tell" situation, he avoids it by allowing his characters to explain the importance of his choices.  i.e., Ursula’s worry of the long line of Jose Arcadios and Aurelianos.

But Marquez, I think, has an ulterior motive to his selection that Ursula has only touched upon.  The novel is obviously a recounting of a period of time in the lives of the Buendia family.  It also is a viewpoint of a historical era of the country.  The longer I live the more I feel that history indeed repeats itself, only the characters change.  But what if we have a personality that endures, in this case, the two types of Jose and Aureliano?  What if we place the same person in to deal with the same situation in a different time in space?  Is it a series of second chances?  Is it a form of reincarnate living through again to learn from mistakes? 

The dream of endless rooms takes on more meaning now.