“WHERE’S THE SCORPION”: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’
“There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.”
This novel is the rich and colourful account of one tumultuous century of love and war in the solitary town of Macondo hidden in the South American jungle. We are immersed in the lives of the notorious Buendia family, from the patriarch of the story, Jose Arcadio Buendia, to the last of their line, Aureliano Babilonia, who dies swept away in the biblical hurricane that wipes Macondo from the face of the earth.
Marquez manages to capture an entire century through the lyrical portrayal of the most ordinary and extraordinary moments. These moments make a vibrant photo album that knits together the lives of the Buendias through all their many trials. Indeed, one of the most distinctive features of this work is how Marquez incorporates the supernatural into the depiction of the natural so that it appears as just that: natural. He once said that he wanted to write like his grandmother used to tell him stories. She would relate the epic, magical tales with a dead-pan expression as though she was describing the weather. This magic realism is certainly essential to the success of the novel, but I don’t think this is what makes it so powerful. Magic enhances the captured moments but it is humanity itself that endures. It is the most fundamental human desires, fears and oddities that are so captivating because, made so vivid by the magical elements of the story world, they zap us right to the core.
This book is an exploration of what it is to be human. Running like veins through the story, the lifeblood of the novel, are the recurring themes of solitude, sexuality, and time. These enable the exploration of humanity at its most intense. I say ‘most intense’ as the characters are ruled by their deepest desires, passions, and doubts, which, in their solitude, become the masters of their fates, to paraphrase WE Henley. Today, we are still influenced by our basest passions, however, these become buried beneath the monotony of modernity. One Hundred Years of Solitude teases at the fundamental truth that it is our passion that makes us human, and in our solitude, these passions can destroy us. I think you could make the argument that it is one of the most violent books ever written.
The life and death of Macondo, the rise and fall of the Buendias, is so rich in emotion because of its characters. It is the characters that lend such colour to the writing. Jose Arcadio Buendia, referred to always by his full name, is the patriarch of the family, the man who set out against all odds into the wild on his stubborn quest to find the sea. After months of searching he has a vision on the side of a river, a dream “that right there a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up.” And so he founded Macondo. He thought he discovered the meaning of this vision when the gypsies begin visiting the town:
“Jose Arcadio Buendia did not succeed in deciphering the dream of houses with mirror walls until the day he discovered ice. Then he thought he understood its deep meaning. He thought that in the near future they would be able to manufacture blocks of ice on a large scale from such a common material as water and with them build the new houses of the village. Macondo would no longer be a burning place, where the hinges and door knockers twisted with heat, but would be changed into a wintry city.”
This striking contrast between “a burning place” and “a wintry city” sets the tone for the rest of the novel, one of vibrant contrasts and conflicts. The moment of the discovery of ice is one that anchors the whole first third of the story due to the first line that is perhaps the most famous in all of literature:
“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.”
The first half of the novel is concerned with the rise of the town and the family, the many births, and the vibrancy of life, before the latter half of the century sees the fall, the deaths, the achievement of the purity of solitude, and the destruction of all that came before. It is Jose Arcadio Buendia’s wife, Ursula Iguaran, that marches inexorably on through the decades as a seemingly eternal guardian to her family, far more of a matriarch than her husband is a patriarch. It is she who is the custodian of their honour, their prosperity, their happiness. Undoubtedly my favourite character, she is not corrupted by passion as all the others are over the six generations, but is strengthened by it. This is down to her passion being the wellbeing of her family, her comical prayer that none are born with the tails of pigs through incest, and her untiring work to keep the household running.
The Buendia household becomes a character in its own right throughout the century, the harbour of all the madness. But Ursula is wonderfully down to earth, offering a sure little island of lucidity and sanity in the writhing oceans of Buendia life. When her husband exclaims with “august solemnity” to his children, “devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wrath of his imagination”, his discovery that “the earth is round, like an orange,” she experiences a moment of exasperation and temporarily loses control, something she does not do often despite the circumstances, and cries, “If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself!” This lust for knowledge, passion for invention and discovery, and weakness for the seductions of imagination is something that defines Jose Arcadio Buendia. His mad workshop and insane ventures are set in striking contrast to Ursula’s indefatigable practicality and noble compassion. She reminds me of a medieval Mrs Weasley. Or rather, Mrs Weasley reminds me of a wand-wielding Ursula (Marquez’ estate, I will write the script). To her final days, after one hundred and twenty years of life, Ursula maintains her lucidity. One of the funniest and most perfect moments in the book takes place when Ursula is cleaning sheets on just another ordinary day of tiresome chores, when, suddenly feeling the weight of a “century of conformity” pressing suffocatingly down on her, she straightens, and yells out at the top of her voice, “SHIT.” Fernanda, one of the younger women of the household, comes bursting in crying, “where’s the scorpion” as she whirls wildly around. Ursula simply smiles and continues with her work. It’s bloody hysterical. Honestly, folks, I was on the floor.
Ursula’s mind does stay intact but she begins to confuse the present with the past. She grows completely blind, but no one ever finds this out as she sees with the sheer power of memory, smell and touch. In her last hours she is “a newborn old woman”, shrunken to the size of an infant after a “torrential hundred years.” Heartbreakingly, there are few people at her funeral as few remember her.
“The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.”
It is Ursula who notices that all those who bear the name of Aureliano are solemn, thoughtful and noble, and all those who bear the name of Arcadio are strong, charismatic and vibrant. But every character has their own unique oddities and flaws, and all are driven to tragedy, to solitude, to insanity by their own passions. Colonel Aureliano Buendia, one who I thought would be a paragon of moral virtue from the noble traits he showed in childhood, became seduced by the glories of war, fuelled by his own quest for honour and pride. This pride destroyed him and turned him into a man incapable of love, as Ursula realises. This is when the politics of the novel emerge, as Colonel Aureliano Buendia is drawn into the savage civil war between the uprising Liberals and the ruling Conservatives. He wages and loses thirty-two civil wars and lives out his days making tiny gold fishes in his father’s old workshop. The fishes become a symbol of lost dreams, symbols of rebellion that become dusty and forgotten relics.
To contrast, the passion that controls Amaranta, Ursula’s daughter, is one that turns her cold and bitter. She is warped by fear and doubt of her own sexuality, driven to cruelty by jealousy of Rebeca, the mysterious girl taken in to the Buendias household and treated as one of their own. Amaranta never forgives Rebeca for winning the affections of the man she loved, Pietro Crespi, even resolving to murder her. In her rage she accidentally poisons Remedios Moscote, Aureliano Buendia’s fragile wife, and this triggers a life warped by resentment, guilt, hatred and regret. She dies a maid, crippled not by insensitivity but by her own insecurities. She even denied herself happiness when she turned down an offer of marriage from one of her brother’s heroic comrades, plunging her hand into the stove in her madness and wearing a black bandage for the rest of her life. Amaranta, like so many of the others, reaches a state of pure solitude, and spends her final years making and unmaking her own funeral shroud. Rebeca’s story is just as turbulent and tragic. She ends up marrying her ‘brother’ Jose Arcadio after he returned from years of travelling the world, utterly seduced by his sheer masculinity. However, following his murder, she lives out her days locked in her small house, becoming one with the earth, essentially buried alive. Her passion led to her solitude. And so it is down the generations.
Pilar Ternera, mistress of both Aureliano Buendia and Jose Arcadio lives to the colossal age of one hundred and fifty, a prostitute her entire life, and a fortune-teller predicting the fates of the Buendias, a perpetual presence in the background. Aureliano Segundo lives a life of decadence and over-indulgence, split between his wife, Fernanda del Carpio, and his whore, but neglecting his accomplished daughter, Renata Remedios, and so unable to prevent her fate of exile when her mother discovers her making love to a foreigner. Jose Arcadio Segundo becomes consumed by Melquiades’ scrolls. Remedios the Beauty drives men to their deaths but remains oblivious and innocent to it all, a creature of the earth, eventually rising up to heaven like an angel as Santa Sofia, Fernanda, and Amaranta do the washing. The characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude unfailingly reach just that, solitude.
Solitude is something that connects all the characters, generation after generation, something they find after the trials of life, something that leads to their downfall. Even Macondo itself is lost to solitude: “forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was impossible to sleep.” When the wise Catalonian who ran the bookstore for half his life suddenly leaves Macondo, selling many of his priceless volumes, it heralds the beginning of the end. He leaves on a train with a precious cargo of some of his books plus three crates of his own mysterious writings: “The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.” In his conflicting nostalgias he grows bitter and taciturn and writes to say Macondo should be abandoned in a poignant speech of cynicism and disillusionment:
“Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
Throughout the story it is described as “the paradise of shared solitude” and “the pox of solitude”. It is both wonderful and terrible at the same time. The second theme, sexuality, is also at the core of the motives of many of the events of the book, something explored with trepidation in youth, in the notoriety of Catarino’s store, and then relished in with experience. From Ursula’s fear of babies born with pig tails right through to the love of Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula, incest is a prospect that tortures the Buendias. The latter couple are the most shocking of all. Aureliano begins to lust after his aunt with an insatiable passion and one day as she returns from washing herself in a thin towel, and with her husband in the next room, they engage in a ferociously violent and silent struggle. It begins as rape but becomes consensual before giving way to the most loving relationship of the whole century. But it is the theme of time that holds everything together. It is Pilar Ternera who makes the profound observation that:
“The history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.”
The characters are bound by fatalism, their corrupting passions leading them on inevitable journeys towards joy and despair in equal measure, journeys that are repeated through the generations. Indeed, it seems possible for these journeys to go round and round into eternity were it not for the fall of Macondo and the ravaging ants. The supernatural laces the natural world with signposts in the form of ghosts who guide the living, the ghost of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s rival, one that eternally tortures him with guilt, then the ghost of Jose Arcadio Buendia himself beneath the chestnut tree, then the ghost of old Melquiades who resides in the room of the seventy-four chamber pots. And in a sense, the Buendias were ghosts, and Macondo a ghost town, perfectly isolated but inevitably dragged down the course of Latin American history.
As an English reader I miss out on the lyrical elegance of the original Spanish that is undoubtedly gilded with assonance, grace and, sheer musicality, however, I do think the most striking thing about Marquez’s writing is his imagery. Take this description of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s son, Jose Arcadio, who vanished after the unexpected birth of his first son by the prostitute, Pilar Ternera. In this scene he appears after years of silence, an utterly changed man, forever altered by his travels of the world, so much so that Ursula barely recognises him:
“He was wearing a medal of Our Lady of Help around his bison neck, his arms and chest were completely covered with cryptic tattooing, and on his right wrist was the tight copper bracelet of the ninos-en-cruz amulet. His skin was tanned by the salt of the open air, his hair was short and straight like the mane of a mule, his jaws were of iron, and he wore a sad smile. He had a belt on that was twice as thick as the cinch of a horse, boots with leggings and spurs and iron on the heels, and his presence gave the quaking impression of a seismic tremor.”
This is characteristic of Marquez’s imagery, simply spilling over with rich sensory detail. We can smell the salty air of the sea on Jose Arcadio’s skin, we can see the intertwining blue and red tattoos, we can hear his heavy breathing in the shocked silence, we can feel the scratchy stubble on his chin. In short, he has “appeared like a thunderclap.” The novel is littered with the most beautiful similes and metaphors that appear with the perfect level of frequency to deliver a moment of exquisite poignancy. Melquiades’ elegant handwriting is likened to “pieces of clothing put out to dry on a line.” Aureliano and Fernanda wearily and monotonously clean their rooms in their solitude while “the cobwebs fell like snow on the rose bushes, carpeted the beams, cushioned the walls.” One Friday “the world lighted up with a crazy crimson sun as harsh as brick dust and almost as cool as water.” Aureliano Buendia visits the doctor and “in the den that smelled of camphorated cobwebs he found himself facing a kind of dusty iguana whose lungs whistled when he breathed.” In the rain the streets “were as slippery and as smooth as melted soap.” Marquez’s mastery of language is itself magical.
The moments that form this photo album of one family in one town are what make this novel so powerful. They are snapshots of humanity at its most intense, merely emphasised by its conveyance through the supernatural. They allow us to make sense of the world we live in, to understand what it means to be human. Passion: it creates, destroys, discovers, corrodes. In solitude it heralds insanity, in sexuality it fuels lust, in time it determines our fates. Fatalism becomes the compass with which the characters navigate the tempests of life. And so as I said before, Marquez manages to capture an entire century through the lyrical portrayal of the most ordinary and extraordinary moments. Marquez himself epitomises this when Aureliano Babilonia realises the mysterious coded scrolls of the old gypsy, Melquiades, locked in the Buendias household for all this time are actually the entire family history written in advance: “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.” Macondo’s fall into dereliction, into the annals of legend, heralds its final chapter:
“It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.”
The following moments are six of the rawest and most powerful in the whole novel, moments that made me look inside myself and think about humanity and the nature of emotion, of love and loss, violence, anguish, hatred, despair, and unconditional joy. These moments, gilded by magic, become all the more powerful because of it. The magical portrayal of humanity allows the truly human stuff to emerge:
1) The execution of Arcadio
This comes amidst Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s many civil wars. Arcadio, his nephew, faces the firing squad as he once did but this time there is no Jose Arcadio to save him. “Then, all accumulated in the rip of a claw, he felt again all the terror that had tormented him in his life. The captain gave the order to fire. Arcadio barely had time to put out his chest and raise his head, not understanding where the hot liquid that burned his thighs was pouring from.” An execution is always shocking but perhaps it is the final words that make it all the more raw and human. Fear can perhaps never be defeated, just silenced.
2) The execution of Colonel Aureliano Buendia
And so a third of the way through the novel we reach the moment captured in the very first line, fully expecting this to be the final death of the man reported to have died so many times, the unbeatable man beaten in so many wars. “When the squad took aim, the rage had materialised into a viscous and bitter substance that put his tongue to sleep and made him close his eyes. Then the aluminium glow of dawn disappeared and he saw himself again in short pants, wearing a tie around his neck, and he saw his father leading him into the tent on a splendid afternoon, and he saw the ice.” This powerful evocation of a lost childhood moment, so ordinary but so extraordinary, is perhaps proof that innocence never truly dies, that childhood merely lies locked in our minds ready to burst forth and consume us once more in the moments of our greatest fear.
3) The death of Jose Arcadio Buendia
This is perhaps the most poignant moment of the novel, the first major death driving home the realisation of the inevitability of death, and perhaps where the decline of Macondo can be traced from, the end of its founder. “A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.” This shower of tiny yellow flowers is an image far more powerful than any elegy could be, a final lament for a fallen father. The scene is both eerie and inexpressibly beautiful.
4) The massacre of the three thousand
Described by some as the key scene of the novel, this is one of such brutality that it never exists . . . Resulting from a great town strike, Jose Arcadio Segundo along with thousands of men, women and children are tricked into going to the train station to wait for a verdict for the strike’s demands, and are surrounded by machine guns. He is the only survivor, and wakes in a train full of corpses. After managing to escape the horror in the darkness he arrives exhausted back at Macondo to discover that everyone thinks the strike ended peacefully and that the workers simply returned home. Fernanda locks him in the room of the chamber pots and when the soldiers come looking for him they cannot physically see him there. In a poignant moment, one of the officers asks to keep a surviving tiny golden fish and leaves in childlike wonder. It is a nightmarish moment reminiscent of the inhumane massacres of the 20th century, and the fact that it is condemned forever to legend makes it all the more tragic.
5) Fernanda’s nostalgia
Fernanda, the wife of the notoriously decadent, materialistic Aureliano Segundo, came to Macondo as the most beautiful woman in the land, a Queen among squalor. After her husband’s death, her son’s departure to Rome to study in a seminary, her first daughter’s exile, her second daughter’s departure to study in Brussels, she finds herself all alone in the Buendias household with only her memories. Her hard exterior, her virtuosity and sternness which she had hid behind for so long, cracks as she remembers “the odour 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 . . . Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, 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.” This evokes the feeling of disillusionment after a life of duty, we can feel Fernanda’s crushing weariness and it makes one want to weep with yearning for lost youth, for dreams shattered with the sure blow of reality. Once more Marquez channels the most natural fears that torture us, those of old age and lost dreams, of a wasted life.
6) The unlocking of Melquiades’ cryptic scrolls
Aureliano’s loses his aunt as she delivers his baby, another Aureliano, born with the tail of a pig. In his grief he wanders for a day only to return to find the baby has been eaten alive by ants. That’s when he suddenly realises how to read Melquiades’ scrolls, the history of the Buendias, his own ending: “In that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. Wounded by the fatal lances of his own nostalgia and that of others, he admired the persistence of the spiderwebs on the dead rose bushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn. And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden.” This is masterful. The ethereal poignancy of Aureliano’s memories are utterly shattered by the nightmarish image of the newborn’s emaciated corpse. This is one of those centuries in a moment. From the glory of the past, the splendour of youth, and the golden smoulder of memory, we are brutally returned to the horror of reality, the inevitability of death, and the finality of destruction. This is life. And this is the end.
The novel ends on a poignant and terrible note of solitude. Macondo was created from the passion of its founders, the inexhaustible fuel of their hopes and dreams, and it passes away into legend, forgotten, lost in the eternal potency of its memories. Its fate is predetermined, a city of mirrors to be shattered into a city of mirages, in turn shattering the illusion of a brave new world and delivering the fatalistic moral that destruction is inevitable. History is mapped out before us intrepid humans and time repeats itself as we embark on the same journeys, doomed to our destinies of disillusionment and eventual destruction. In short, Macondo is consumed by time.
“Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
