. Spinning .

I laid this book aside a day, knowing that a war was imminent and both for need to prepare myself for battle here and in reality, as well as a decided lack of interest in the politics of yet another screwed-up country.

Marquez’s first line of 100 Years repeats itself in my head:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

One hundred pages later, we find Aureliano a young widower in a time and village that is involved in unsettlement of government.  He is tied to the Conservatives though marriage, unguided by his father, who has managed (until his unfortunate breakdown and resultant life tethered to a tree) to keep the village he had founded fairly free of government till now, and disgusted both by the Conservative tampering of ballots and the Liberal thirst for blood of even those containing lesser pints, like children, Aureliano strikes out with an army of his own.  We cheer him on, for he seems to have found himself at last. 

And also at last, we find and place him back and forward in time by Marquez’s clever manipulation–and an unmatched sense of humor:

"Don Apolinar Moscote had trouble identifying that conspirator in high boots and with a rifle slung over his shoulder with the person he had played dominoes with until nine in the evening.

‘This is madness, Aurelito,’ he exclaimed.

‘Not madness," Aureliano said.  ‘War.  And don’t call me Aurelito any more.  Now I’m Colonel Aureliano Buendia.’ "

I turn the page to a new chapter:

"Colonel Aureliano Buendia organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all.  He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty-five.  He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad.  he lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse."

"(…)He shot himself in the chest with a pistol and the bullet came out through his back without claiming any vital organs.  The only thing left of all that was a street that bore his name in Macondo.  And yet, as he declared a few years before he died of old age, he had not expected any of that on the dawn he left with his twenty-one men to join the forces of General Victorio Medina."

There you go.  We find out that nothing is what it seems to be.  The "discovered ice" was brought to this hot climate by a gypsy.  The firing squad that Aureliano faced on page one were lousy shots, I guess.  Not really false illusions pretentiously offered us by Marquez, but pictures we have decided on our own from his intriguing opening sentence.  Because we wrote the book, we can only laugh at ourselves for our mistakes in perception.

And isn’t that where Marquez excels in writing?  Perhaps I would feel cheated if this were the end of the Buendia story, but it is not.  There’s more–three hundred pages more to lure me onward.  And if I have come to accept the surrealism of parts of story, and if I have been misguided in my path by my own choosing, then shall I not proceed with ever more caution?

Ah, the prodigal son returns.  Jose, who took off with the gypsies, Aurielano’s brother, has returned.  A wanderer of land and seas, a big hulk of a man who has grown to almost match the size of his penis, which, like the rest of him, is covered in tattoos.  And which he has followed around, led by its competent point of assuring him love and fortune enough to survive.  It has also captured the attention of Rebeca, the young woman who was brought to his mother’s door as a young girl sucking her finger and eating whitewash and dirt when disheartened.

"One afternoon, when everyone was having a siesta, she could no longer resist and went to his bedroom.  She found him in his shorts, lying in the hammock that he had hung from the beams with a ship’s hawser.  She was so impressed by his enormous motley nakedness that she felt an impulse to retreat.  "Excuse me," she said, "I didn’t know you were here."  But she lowered her voice so as not to wake anyone up.  "Come here," he said.  Rebeca obeyed.  She stopped beside the hammock in an icy sweat, feeling knots forming in her intestines, while Jose Arcadio stroked her ankles with the tips of his fingers, then her calves, then her thighs, murmuring, "Oh, little sister, little sister."  She had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startingly regulated cyclonic power lifted her up by the waist and despoiled her of her intimacy with three slashes of its claws and quartered her like a little bird.  She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock which absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter.

"Three days later they were married during the five-o’clock mass."

But amidst this dysfunctional family (Aurielano is just getting over the death of his 11-year old bride), there is a power even in their loving.  They are usually overcome, smitten by lust before they even understand what it is about.  The intensity that the patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, puts into his quest to understand his world, is to a degree evident in his children in their own chosen goals.  Aurielano, in his pursuit of the child-woman Remedios.  For many years, in Amaranta in her resolve to destroy Rebeca’s intent to marry the wispy Pietro Crespi, prior to the return of Jose and her passionate deflowering in the hammock.  In Jose, in once having discovered the power in his penis, dutifully allows it to master his life.

I don’t care how big it is; I still like his father the best.

Unless two members of the Buendia family get to face a firing squad, page 96 of the Harper Perennial edition of 100 Years of Solitude includes an error in naming Arcadio rather than Aureliano as the man so honored:  "She was the last person Arcadio thought about a few years later when he faced the firing squad."

Seeing that Marquez has reminded us a couple times of the hopelessness of avoiding the issue by referring to his opening line, I am inclined to take it as a typeset error.  Although with this family, it would not seem strange or too conveniently coincidental that at least two would come to such an end.

Jose is distraught, his son Aureliano busy in the alchemy shop, his wife and daughter away, his inventions having proved nothing to him.  He is wrestling with ghosts, that of Prudencio, the man he killed back in the old village, and of Melquiades, the gypsy who brought him such wonders to fiddle with.

"A few hours later, worn out by the vigil, he went into Aureliano’s workshop and asked him:  "What day is today?"  Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday.    "I was thinking the same thing," Jose Arcadio Buendia said, "but suddenly I realized that it’s still Monday, like yesterday.  Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the begonias.  Today is Monday too."  Used to his manias, Aureliano paid no attention to him.  On the next day, Wednesday, Jose Arcadio Buendia went back to the workshop.  "This is a disaster," he said.  "Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before.  Today is Monday too."

Wow.  That’s an interesting idea, no?  And I note here particularly Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s choice of words, his use of language:  "Look at the sky, look at the wall, look at the begonias."  In a tense moment of insight on the part of Jose, Marquez softens it with the word "begonias" which, while not funny in itself, just is in this instance.  In fact, another "side" of the word is that in truth, the begonias which are living plants, would change in four days.  Is Marquez pointing out things we take for granted that are transient?  Has he carefully selected the words to zoom in from sky, to wall, to flower?  And the unnatural action of "looking" at air, and the "buzzing of the sun" reiterates the feeling in Jose’s questioning of the natural space of time.

"He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference in their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.  He spent the whole night in bed with his eyes open, calling to Prudencio Aquilar, to Melquiades, to all the dead, so that they would share his distress.  But no one came.  On Friday, before anyone arose, he watched the appearance of nature again until he did not have the slightest doubt but that it was Monday."

Hate to say this, but I understand this theory perfectly.   I read these paragraphs in wonder and sympathy, knowing that I myself have followed a similar path of thought–even posting on it on Spinning once after a few quiet moments in the dark garage.  These are the things men think about, worry about, but rarely speak of with others.  Jose Arcadio Buendia is a philosopher looking for some shred of truth to expound upon, wanting his wild ideas validated by scientific evidence.  I love him.  I love his willingness to find more meaning and understanding of his world than rising, working, eating, shitting and going back to bed.

Of course, he does end up tied to a chestnut tree babbling to himself.