. Spinning .

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.