Reading the Canon of the World Literature April 4 – 6

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

We’re halfway Semana Santa and our little rock is invaded by herds of drunk and pot smoking tourists. The part of the population that isn’t working into the tourism industry is either gleefully participating or went into lockdown with enough food and drink to survive for a week; just occasionally throwing a little diner party into each other’s house with a carefully edited guest list.
Meanwhile I’m going to make another major jump through the literary space-time continuum to get to another family saga that evolves having for background Columbia from the middle of the 19th century till the middle of the 20th century. The novel was first published in Spanish in 1967.
April 4, 2015.
Summary;
Because the book used a lot of flashback and actually started with an event that was only to occur somewhere halfway, I decided to summarize it in a chronically linear way.
Two cousins, Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula loved each other and got married without their families’ permission. After the marriage, Ursula gets preoccupied that incest will lead to a child with a pig’s tail and she refused to consume the marriage.
When Jose won a cockfight the loser of it, Prudencio Aguilar, teased him with his wife’s virgin state and in a rage Jose killed him, went home and forced his wife to have sex with him.
After that Prudencio’s ghost started to haunt them and they decided to move away with some of their friends to found a new town to be called Macondo. The idea was to set Macondo up at the seaside, but despite a long search they couldn’t find the seaside.
Ursula and José Arcadio Buendia got two sons, José Arcadio (II) who was strong and hard while his brother Aureliano was more studious, withdrawn and clairvoyant. The main contact with the outside world that the town had was through a band of gypsies leaded by Melquíades who always brought some wonderful technological and magical gadgets like magnifying glasses, flying carpets, magnets, ice, etc… These things were always carefully scrutinized by José Arcadio Buendia to see if he couldn’t turn them into weapons.
Because José Arcadio grew frustrated by the fact that the town’s only contact to the outside world depended upon a yearly visit of a group of nomadic gypsies, he and some other men organized an expedition to find a way to the outside world. They went off but got lost into the jungle, became a little psychotic and in the end, they gave up.
During the time that his father was away from home, José Arcadio (II) had a relation with Pilar Ternera that resulted in a pregnancy but he shrank away from the responsibilities of fatherhood and started instead an affair with a gypsy girl and joined their band when they moved on.
In an attempt to find him, his mother left the town for some time and during her search she found a way to another town, thus connecting Macondo with the outside world and bringing in some new townsfolk. As a side effect, the government also became aware of the existence of Macondo and sent an administrator called Don Apolinar Moscote.
After giving birth to her baby, Pilar Ternera gave her son up to the Buendia clan and they named him Arcadio and he grew up without knowing who his parents were. Around the same time the Buendias also adopted an orphan called Rebecca who carried a bag with her parents’ bones and a letter for José Arcadio.
Ursula and José Arcadio got a daughter named Amaranta. Their youngest son, Aureliano developed meanwhile an obsession for Remedios, Don Apolinar’s beautiful but only nine year old daughter.
Shortly afterwards the town was hit by a plague that caused insomnia and a complete loss of memory. They tried to fight the plague by putting post signs and to create a memory machine, but it was all in vain. At the brink of a catastrophe, they were saved by Melquíades who brought them a potion that restored their memories. Melquíades claimed that he resurrected from the dead because dead was to boring. He took up residence into an empty room of the Buendia mansion and started to teach Aureliano how he could become a goldsmith and the rest of his time he spent on writing manuscripts in a secret language.
Another memory that popped up after the plague was the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, who had spent years trying to find José Arcadio and Macondo. He hung out with José Arcadio for a long night, and the next day José Arcadio had gone completely insane. The family tied him to a tree in the backyard where he seemed happy, speaking some language no one could understand.
Aureliano found an outlet for his frustrations about the little girl by having sex with Pilar Ternera and she got pregnant. But he couldn’t put the girl out his head and at the end he confessed to Pilar who arranged an agreement for the marriage when the girl would get her first period. When Remedios got her first period at the age of twelve, she married Aureliano and he was a happy man for a while.
Ursula wanted to organize a party to brighten the mood of the family a little and for that purpose she decided to buy a player-piano. The player-piano arrived with a technician to install it; a man called Pietro Crespi. Two girls of the Buendia household, Rebeca and Amaranta fell in love with him, but Pietro decided to marry Rebecca (probably because Amaranta was still very young). Amaranta went completely nuts and invented all kinds of plots to sabotage the wedding plans, but ultimately she started to contemplate murder as an ultimate resort although she hoped that she wouldn’t have to resolve to that solution. Shortly afterwards Remedios died of a bleeding caused by an extra-uterus pregnancy.
The unexpected comeback of José Arcadio (II) to town as a wild and tattooed giant did shake up the relational balances and he and Rebecca (his step-sister) fell wildly in love with each other and she married him instead of Pietro while everyone else disapproved because of the almost incestuous nature of the relation. Now Pietro fell in love with Amaranta (who was meanwhile a couple of years older) but she rejected him (probably not happy about being just second choice) whereupon a desperate Pietro committed suicide.
After the dead of his child-bride, Aureliano got gradually more involved into politics; at first in support of the conservative party that his Father in Law adhered, but when he realized how corrupt that party was, he switched sides to the Liberal rebellion. He started to call himself Colonel Buendia and fought in more than 30 rebellions that he lost all, but always narrowly escaped capture or assassination attempts. During his campaigns he fathered seventeen sons who were all called Aureliano with seventeen different women. But his luck didn’t last and finally he was imprisoned and got the dead penalty. His last wish was that they would put him before the firing squad in Macondo and there, into the nick of time, he got saved by his brother who stormed out of his house as a screaming tattooed giant, threatening the soldiers of the firing squad with a rifle till they backed off.
Meanwhile the civil war went on and Arcadio, the secret son of José Arcadio (II) with Pilar Ternera, married Santa Sofia de la Piedad. They had three children; Remedios and the twins Aurelianus Segundo and Arcadio Segundo. While she was pregnant, the Colonel put him in charge of the town and he started to terrorize the people out of resentment for all the mishaps he had to suffer during his childhood and met his fate in front of a firing squad. At the end of the civil war, the power-hungry liberal leaders forced the Colonel to endorse a peace agreement that contained almost nothing of the values he was fighting for and he retired to Macondo as a disillusioned man. In Macondo he sank into depression and kept to his alchemist laboratory, where he kept making golden fishes in order to melt them down and to start all over again.
The relative political stability attracted foreign investors and an American company started a banana plantation at the outskirts of Macondo with their own fenced community. Shortly afterwards the plantation workers start to complain about their working conditions and lack of payment. They got only some kind of monopoly money that they only could spend into the companies’ stores, where there was almost nothing to buy. So they go on strike and the company invited them to a reconciliation meeting under supervision of a government negotiator.
The workers gathered at at the place that was agreed but found themselves surrounded by soldiers with machineguns who shot all 3000 of them, loaded the bodies upon a train and dumped them into the sea. The only survivor was José Arcadio Segundo, who was one of the union leaders, who came back to himself on the train, surrounded by corpses and managed to jump of it and to escape back to Macondo.
The people of Macondo would till the end believe the government version; that the workers reached an agreement with the company and went peacefully home. Shortly afterwards the banana plantation folded and the company moved its operations elsewhere.
Meanwhile his brother, Aureliano Segundo had a romance with Petra Cotes, but instead of marrying her, by a twist of mind, he married a compulsive religious fanatic called Fernanda who was raised by her lunatic parents into the belief that she would become a queen.
After his wedding he kept frequenting Petra Cotes and their wild sex life created an aura that made their farm animals breed like crazy and as a result they became very wealthy. Meanwhile he fathered with Fernanda a daughter called Meme and a son José Arcadio (III).
When Meme as a teenager fell in love with a young mechanic called Mauricio Babilonia her mother, upon discovering the romance had him shot as a thief when he tried to sneak into the house to make love to Meme and sent her daughter off to a convent as a lunatic.
After a year a nun showed up with a very unwelcome surprise; meme’s baby son, who was kept sequestered to the house who had as only company Fernanda and Aureliano Segundo’s last daughter Amaranta Ursula, without knowing that the girl was actually his aunt and Fernanda his grandmother.
Next thing that happened was a rain flood of biblical proportions that lasted for five years without interruption and completely washed away all the town’s assets. The mater familias of the clan, Ursula, died and so did almost everyone else
Fernanda’s daughter, Amaranta Ursula took off to Belgium where she married a pilot by the name of Gaston and Auriliano (II) stayed behind alone into the family’s mansion. Jose Arcadio (III) came back and discovered a gold treasure that his bet grandmother (Ursula) was hiding under the floor of her bedroom and got killed by a band of young punks that he was hanging out with him so that they could steal his gold.
Amaranta Ursula returned with her husband and found nothing better to do then to start an affair with her nephew and the pilot eventually filed for divorce.
The more their relation evolved, the faster speeded the decay of the house. They still didn’t know in what way they were related when Ursula Amaranta got pregnant and gave birth to a child with a pigtail and died during the birth process.
He got depressed and went off for a drinking marathon and by the time he remembered the baby, it was eaten by ants. Torn between guilt and self-pity he turned to Melquíades’ manuscripts and finally managed to decipher it, just to discover that it told the family saga from the moment that the insane patriarch of the Buendia family was roped to a three, up to the devouring of his baby by the ants.
Then a huge storm formed and wiped out the whole town and its remaining habitants from existence and memory.
April 6, 2015
Comments;
The massacre of the bananeros in Macondo is a fictional version of a real massacre that took place on December 6, 1928 in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia on behest of the United Fruit Company and under pressure of the US government who threatened to send in the Marine Corps to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company.
Just like in the novel, the mention of the massacre was for a long time suppressed by the official history writing and even well into the sixties of the twentieth century, it caused Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was at that time also working as a journalist, problems to obtain a visa to travel to the US.