外国经典 》 One Hundred Years of Solitude 》
Chapter 1 Page 1
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
第一章
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad) is a novel written by Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It was first published in Spanish in 1967. The book was an instant success worldwide and was translated into over 37 languages. Lauded critically, it is the major work of the Latin American "boom" in literature. It was also an immense commercial success, becoming the best-selling book in Spanish in modern history, after Don Quixote. It is widely considered García Márquez's magnum opus.
The novel chronicles the history of the Buendía family in the town founded by their patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía. It is built on multiple time frames, playing on ideas presented earlier by Jorge Luis Borges in stories such as The Garden of Forking Paths.
Biographical background and publication
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927. García Márquez is a Colombian-born author and journalist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and a pioneer of the Latin American “Boom.” Affectionately known as “Gabo” to millions of readers, he first won international fame with his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a defining classic of twentieth century literature . His Colombian roots influenced large parts of the novel, as evidenced by the different myths throughout the novel . These myths, along with events in the novel, recount a large portion of Colombian history. For instance, “the arguments over reform in the nineteenth century, the arrival of the railway, the War of the Thousand Days, the American fruit company, the cinema, the automobile, and the massacre of striking plantation workers” are all incorporated in the novel at one point or another".
Plot summary
The novel chronicles the seven generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo. The family patriarch and founder of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and his wife (and first cousin), Úrsula, leave their home in Riohacha, Colombia in hopes of finding a new home. One night on their journey while camping on the banks of a river, José Arcadio Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo. Upon awakening, José Arcadio Buendía decides to found this city on the site of their campground. After wandering aimlessly in the jungle for many days, the founding of Macondo can be seen as the founding of UtopiaJosé Arcadio Buendía believes it to be surrounded by water, and from this 'island' he invents the world according to him, naming things at will. After its establishment, Macondo soon becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events. All the events revolve around the many generations of the Buendía family, who are either unable or unwilling to escape periodic, mostly self-inflicted misfortunes. Ultimately, Macondo is destroyed by a terrible hurricane, which symbolizes the cyclical turmoil inherent in Macondo. At the end of the book one of the Buendía male decendants finally cracks a cipher that the males in his family had been trying to solve for generation. The cipher stated all the events that the Buendía family had gone through. Note that this information was available at the beginning of time, and in possession of the Buendia family, before Macondo was even thought of, just indecipherable.
Historical Context
Although One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered a work of fiction, Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian native, drew upon his country’s history to create a world which parallels many of the major events in Colombia’s history, thus establishing the novel as a piece of critical interpretation.
Prior to European conquest, the region now called Colombia had no cultural developments akin to those of the Incas, the Mayas or the Aztecs The region consisted mainly of large families grouped into larger units that served to define local monarchies . The most well defined tribal groups of the area were the Tairona, the Cenu, the Chibcha . The first Spanish settlement was established in 1509 under the direction of Vasco Nunez de Balboa, as a precursor to the conquest of the territory . Marquez uses the founding of the town of Macondo by the Buendia family as a metaphor for the colonization of the region of Colombia.
After Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada’s conquest of the Chibchas in 1538, Bogotá became the center of Spanish rule . After the collapse of Spanish control in 1810, provincial juntas sprang up almost everywhere to challenge Bogotá’s authority. Eventually though, royalist armies led by Pablo Morillo restored Spanish rule in 1816. Three years later when Simon Bolivar began a second war for independence, he declared the creation of a supranational state-Gran Colombia. With its capital at Bogotá, Gran Colombia survived long enough to witness Spain's final defeat in 1825.
The achievement of Independence in 1819 revealed the further obstacles. Colombia’s geography was a formidable obstacle to modernization. High transportation costs made self-sufficient and disconnected enclaves viable much like the description of the town of Macondo). Colombia had been wrestling with modernity since the eighteenth century. The dynamism of the capitalist revolution gave Colombia’s ruling classes a stark choice: integration with the modern industrial world or perishing in a backwater of barbarism. To incorporate the country with the world, Colombia would have to look to the institutional, political, and economic models of Europe and the United States.
“As nineteenth century Colombians explored, described, and colonized their interior, they mapped racial hierarchy onto an emerging national geography composed of distinct localities and regions. This created a racialized discourse of regional differentiation that assigned greater morality and progress to certain regions that they marked as “white”. Meanwhile, those places defined as “black” and “Indian” were associated with disorder, backwardness, and danger” technology and modernization became associated with race.
In Macondo, with the introduction of technology, a rising population, and modernization came the insomnia plague, which was characterized by forgetfulness. The people of Macondo forgot the words for objects (such as tables and chairs) and eventually forgot the significance or usages of these objects. Not only does this serve as a criticism by Marquez of the modernization of Colombia, but also of the plagues characteristic of the Spanish conquest, which killed many indigenous people throughout the South American continent and the Caribbean. It is estimated that smallpox killed up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas during the conquest. The insomnia of the story represents the nostalgia for the better days of the past, which are now lost upon the residents of Macondo (as a metaphor for Colombia): days before the modernization of the town and before the spread of deadly disease.
The history of Colombia is one that has been marked by years of violence, from wars for independence to the modern-day rebel group commonly known as the FARC. The first major violence in Colombia was a product of the Bolivar Liberation from 1810 to 1821. The leader of the revolution, Simon Bolivar, led many battles against the Spanish in an attempt to free the country from Spanish rule. After independence, well-defined socioeconomic regions, divided in a roughly north-south direction by parallel spurs of the Andes mountains, came into being. During the nineteenth century, the existence of several powerful regional centers undoubtedly contributed to civil disorder . Politically, the relative dispersion of the population and its economic resources caused difficulties for the government’s modernizing programs.
In 1934 a reformist wave brought Dr. Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo to the presidency by unanimous Liberal choice. Lopez imposed La Revolución en Marcha, a revolution characterized by labor reform and social legislation, which angered many Conservatives. In August 1946, Mariano Ospina Pérez took office as the first Conservative president of Colombia. This marked the start of a political breakdown that drew the people under increasingly undemocratic rule . On April 9, 1948, influential and celebrated Liberal candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, was assassinated, sparking the period of Colombia’s history known as “la Violencia”.
By the mid-1960’s, Colombia had witnessed in excess of two hundred thousand politically motivated deaths. La Violencia, from 1946–66, can be broken into five stages: the revival of political violence before and after the presidential election of 1946, the popular urban upheavals generated by Gaitan’s assassination, open guerrilla warfare, first against Conservative government of Ospina Perez, incomplete attempts at pacification and negotiation resulting from the Rojas Pinilla (who had ousted Laureano Gómez), and, finally, disjointed fighting under the Liberal/Conservative coalition of the “National Front,” from 1958 to 1975.
The politically charged violence characteristic of Colombia’s history is paralleled in One Hundred Years of Solitude by the character of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who wages war against the Conservatives who are facilitating the rise to power of foreign imperialists. The wealthy banana plantation owners (perhaps based on the United Fruit Co.) set up their own dictatorial police force, which brutally attacks citizens for even the slightest offenses.
The use of real events and Colombian history by Garcia Marquez makes One Hundred Years of Solitude an excellent example of magical realism. Not only are the events of the story an interweaving of reality and fiction, but the novel as a whole tells the history of Colombia from a critical perspective using magical realism. In this way, the novel compresses several centuries of Latin American history into a manageable text.
Furthermore, the novel points out that the current state of Latin America is the result of the inability to obtain the confidence required to construct a meaningful sense of direction and progress. The tragedy of Latin America is that it lacks a meaningful and solid identity, causing a lack of self-preservation. This can be attributed to a past highlighted by five hundred years of colonization. Subsequently, there is a seemingly perpetual repetition of violence, repression, and exploitation resulting in a loss of authenticity. The reality of Latin America is presented as a reoccurring fantastical world in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a vacuum in which the characters have no chance of survival. The desire for change and forward movement exists in Macondo, just as it does in the countries of Latin America. However, the cyclical nature of time in the novel symbolizes the tendency toward repeating history in reality. Subsequently, meaningful progress is never achieved in Macondo or in Latin America. In this manner, Marquez provides insight into the feeling of solitude in present-day Latin America.
Symbolism and metaphors
A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts. "The ghosts are symbols of the past and the haunting nature it has over Macondo. The ghosts and the displaced repetition that they evoke are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history". "Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions.
The fate of Macondo is both doomed and predetermined from its very existence. "Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities.The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create.
The Ghosts that haunt the people of Macondo are symbols of an inescapable past."Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions".
Márquez uses colours as symbols. Yellow and gold are the most frequently used colours and they are symbols of imperialism and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. Gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction.
The glass city is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. It is the reason for the location of the founding of Macondo, but it is also a symbol of the ill fate of Macondo. Higgins writes that, "By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history". Images such as the glass city and the ice factory represent how Latin America already has its history outlined and is, therefore, fated for destruction.
Overall, there is an underlying pattern of Latin American history in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It could be said that the novel is one of a number of texts that "Latin American culture has created to understand itself" . In this sense, the novel can be conceived as a linear archive. This archive narrates the story of a Latin America discovered by European explorers, which had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument. Melquiades, the keeper of the historical archive in the novel, represents both the whimsical and the literary. Finally, “the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain”
Characters
Buendía Family Tree
First generation
José Arcadio Buendía
Jose Arcadio Buendía is the patriarch of the Buendía family and the founder of Macondo. Buendía leaves Riohacha, Colombia with his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, after murdering Prudencio Aguilar in a duel. One night camping at the side of a river, Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo and decides to establish the town in this location. Jose Arcadio is an introspective, inquisitive man of massive strength and energy who spends more time on his scientific pursuits than with his family. He flirts with alchemy and astronomy and becomes increasingly withdrawn from his family and community. Marquez uses carefully chosen diction, imagery and biblical references to portray this wonderfully unique character to the reader .
Úrsula Iguarán
Úrsula Iguarán is one of the two matriarchs of the Buendía family and is wife to José Arcadio Buendía.
Second generation
José Arcadio
José Arcadio Buendía's firstborn son, José Arcadio seems to have inherited his father's headstrong, impulsive mannerisms. He eventually leaves the family to chase a Gypsy girl and unexpectedly returns many years later as an enormous man covered in tattoos, claiming that he's sailed the seas of the world. He marries his adopted sister Rebeca, causing his banishment from the mansion, and he dies from a mysterious gunshot wound, days after saving his brother from execution.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía
José Arcadio Buendía's second son and the first person to be born in Macondo. He was thought to have premonitions because everything he said came true.He represents not only a warrior figure but also an artist due to his ability to write poetry and create finely crafted golden fish. During the wars he fathered 17 children by unknown women.
Remedios Moscote
Remedios was the youngest daughter of the town's Conservative administrator, Don Apolinar Moscote. Her most striking physical features are her beautiful skin and her emerald-green eyes. The future Colonel Aureliano falls in love with her, despite her extreme youth. She dies shortly after the marriage from a blood poisoning illness during her pregnancy.
Amaranta
The third child of José Arcadio Buendía, Amaranta grows up as a companion of her adopted sister Rebeca. However, her feelings toward Rebeca turn sour over Pietro Crespi, whom both sisters intensely desire in their teenage years. Amaranta dies a lonely and virginal spinster, but comfortable in her existence after having finally accepted what she had become.
Rebeca
Rebeca is the orphaned daughter of Ursula Iguaran's second cousins. At first she is extremely timid, refuses to speak, and has the habits of eating earth and whitewash from the walls of the house, a condition known as pica. She arrives carrying a canvas bag containing her parents' bones and seems not to understand or speak Spanish. However, she responds to questions asked by Visitacion and Cataure in the Guajiro or Wayuu language. She falls in love with and marries her adoptive brother José Arcadio after his return from traveling the world. After his mysterious and untimely death, she lives in seclusion for the rest of her life.
Third generation
Arcadio
Arcadio is José Arcadio's illegitimate son by Pilar Ternera. He is a schoolteacher who assumes leadership of Macondo after Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves. He becomes a tyrannical dictator and uses his schoolchildren as his personal army. Macondo soon becomes subject to his whims. When the Liberal forces in Macondo fall, Arcadio is shot by a Conservative firing squad.
Aureliano José
Aureliano José is the illegitimate son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and Pilar Ternera. He joins his father in several wars before deserting to return to Macondo. He deserted because he is obsessed with his aunt, Amaranta, who raised him since his birth. He is eventually shot to death by a Conservative captain midway through the wars.
Santa Sofía de la Piedad
Santa Sofía is a beautiful virgin girl and the daughter of a shopkeeper. She is hired by Pilar Ternera to have sex with her son Arcadio, her eventual husband. She is taken in along with her children by the Buendías after Arcadio's execution. After Úrsula's death she leaves unexpectedly, not knowing her destination.
17 Aurelianos
During his 32 civil war campaigns, Colonel Aureliano Buendía has 17 sons by 17 different women, each named after their father.. Four of these Aurelianos (A. Triste, A. Serrador, A. Arcaya and A. Centeno) stay in Macondo and become a permanent part of the family. Eventually, as revenge against the Colonel, all are assassinated by the government, which identified them by the mysteriously permanent Ash Wednesday cross on their foreheads. The only survivor of the massacre is A. Amador, who escapes into the jungle only to be assassinated at the doorstep of his father's house many years later.
Fourth generation
Remedios the Beauty
Remedios the Beauty is Arcadio and Santa Sofía's first child. It is said she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, and unintentionally causes the deaths of several men who love or lust over her. She appears to most of the town as naively innocent, and some come to think that she is mentally retarded. However, Colonel Aureliano Buendía believes she has inherited great lucidity: "It is as if she's come back from twenty years of war," he said. She rejects clothing and beauty. Too beautiful and, arguably, too wise for the world, Remedios ascends into the sky one morning, while folding laundry.
José Arcadio Segundo
José Arcadio Segundo is the twin brother of Aureliano Segundo, the children of Arcadio and Santa Sofía. Úrsula believes that the two were switched in their childhood, as José Arcadio begins to show the characteristics of the family's Aurelianos, growing up to be pensive and quiet. He plays a major role in the banana worker strike, and is the only survivor when the company massacres the striking workers. Afterward, he spends the rest of his days studying the parchments of Melquiades, and tutoring the young Aureliano. He dies at the exact instant that his twin does.
Aureliano Segundo
Of the two brothers, Aureliano Segundo is the more boisterous and impulsive, much like the José Arcadios of the family. He takes his first girlfriend Petra Cotes as his mistress during his marriage to the beautiful and bitter Fernanda del Carpio. When living with Petra, his livestock propagate wildly, and he indulges in unrestrained revelry. After the long rains, his fortune dries up, and the Buendías are left almost penniless. He turns to search for a buried treasure, which nearly drives him to insanity. He dies of throat cancer at the same moment as his twin. During the confusion at the funeral, the bodies are switched, and each is buried in the other's grave (highlighting Ursula's earlier comment that they had been switched at birth). Aureliano Segundo represents Colombia's economy: gaining and losing weight according to the situation at the time.
Fernanda del Carpio
Fernanda del Carpio is the only major character (except for Rebeca and the First generation) not from Macondo. She comes from a ruined, aristocratic family that kept her isolated from the world. She was chosen as the most beautiful of 5000 girls. Fernanda is brought to Macondo to compete with Remedios for the title of Queen of the carnival after her father promises her she will be the Queen of Madagascar. After the fiasco, she marries Aureliano Segundo and soon takes the leadership of the family away from the now-frail Úrsula. She manages the Buendía affairs with an iron fist. She has three children by Aureliano Segundo, José Arcadio, Renata Remedios, a.k.a. Meme, and Amaranta Úrsula. She remains in the house after he dies, taking care of the household until her death.
Fernanda is never accepted by anyone in the Buendía household who regard her as an outsider. Although, none of the Buendías rebel against her inflexible conservatism. Her mental and emotional instability is revealed through her paranoia, her correspondence with the 'invisible doctors', and her irrational behavior towards Aureliano, whom she tries to isolate from the whole world.
Fifth generation
Renata Remedios (a.k.a. Meme)
Renata Remedios, or Meme is the second child and first daughter of Fernanda and Aureliano Segundo. While she doesn't inherit Fernanda's beauty, she does have Aureliano Segundo's love of life and natural charisma. After her mother declares that she is to do nothing but play the clavichord, she is sent to school where she receives her performance degree as well as academic recognition. While she pursues the clavichord with 'an inflexible discipline', to placate Fernanda, she also enjoys partying and exhibits the same tendency towards excess as her father.
Meme meets and falls in love with Mauricio Babilonia, but when Fernanda discovers their affair, she arranges for Mauricio to be shot, claiming that he was a chicken thief. She then takes Meme to a convent. Meme remains mute for the rest of her life, partially because of the trauma, but also as a sign of rebellion. Several months later she gives birth to a son, Aureliano, at the convent. He is sent to live with the Buendías. She dies of old age in a hospital in Krakow.
José Arcadio (II)
José Arcadio II, named after his ancestors in the Buendía tradition, follows the trend of previous Arcadios. He is raised by Úrsula, who intends for him to become Pope. He returns from Rome without having become a priest. Eventually, he discovers buried treasure, which he wastes on lavish parties and escapades with adolescent boys. Later, he begins a tentative friendship with Aureliano Babilonia, his nephew. José Arcadio plans to set Aureliano up in a business and return to Rome, but is murdered in his bath by four of the adolescent boys who ransack his house and steal his gold.
Amaranta Úrsula
Amaranta Úrsula is the third child of Fernanda and Aureliano. She displays the same characteristics as her namesake who dies when she is only a child. She never knows that the child sent to the Buendía home is her nephew, the illegitimate son of Meme. He becomes her best friend in childhood. She returns home from Europe with an elder husband, Gastón, who leaves her when she informs him of her passionate affair with her nephew, Aureliano. She dies of hemorragia, after she has given birth to the last of the Buendía line.
Sixth generation
Aureliano Babilonia (Aureliano II)
Aureliano Babilonia, or Aureliano II, is the illegitimate child of Meme. He is hidden from everyone by his grandmother, Fernanda. He is strikingly similar to his namesake, the Colonel, and has the same character patterns as well. He is taciturn, silent, and emotionally charged. He barely knows Úrsula, who dies during his childhood. He is a friend of José Arcadio Segundo, who explains to him the true story of the banana worker massacre.
While other members of the family leave and return, Aureliano stays in the Buendía home. He only ventures into the empty town after the death of Fernanda. He works to decipher the parchments of Melquíades but stops to have an affair with his childhood partner and the love of his life, Amaranta Úrsula, not knowing that she is his aunt. When both her and her child die, he is able to decipher the parchments. "...Melquíades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: 'The first in line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants'." It is assumed he dies in the great wind that destroys Macondo the moment he finishes reading Mequiades' parchments.
Seventh generation
Aureliano (III)
Aureliano III is the child of Aureliano and his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula. He is born with a pig's tail, as the eldest and long dead Úrsula had always feared would happen (the parents of the child had never heard of the omen). His mother dies after giving birth to him, and, due to his grief-stricken father's negligence, he is devoured by ants.
Others
Melquíades
Melquíades is one of a band of gypsies who visit Macondo every year in March, displaying amazing items from around the world. Melquíades sells José Arcadio Buendía several new inventions including a pair of magnets and an alchemist's lab. Later, the gypsies report that Melquíades died in Singapore, but he, nonetheless, returns to live with the Buendía family, stating he could not bear the solitude of death. He stays with the Buendías and begins to write the mysterious parchments that Aureliano Babilonia eventually translates, before dying a second time. This time he drowns in the river near Macondo. He is buried in a grand ceremony organized by the Buendías.
Pilar Ternera
Pilar is a local woman who sleeps with the brothers Aureliano and José Arcadio. She becomes mother of their sons, Aureliano and José Arcadio. Pilar reads the future with cards, and every so often makes an accurate, though vague, prediction. She has close ties with the Buendias throughout the whole novel, helping them with her card predictions. She dies some time after she turns 145 years old (she had eventually stopped counting), surviving until the very last days of Macondo.
The word "Ternera" in Spanish signifies veal or calf, which is fitting considering the way she is treated by Aureliano, Jose Arcadio, and Arcadio. Also, it could be a play on the word "Ternura", which in Spanish means "Tenderness". Pilar is always presented as a very loving figure, and the author often uses names in a similar fashion.
Pietro Crespi
Pietro is a very handsome and polite Italian musician who runs a music school. He installs the pianola in the Buendía house. He becomes engaged to Rebeca, but Amaranta, who also loves him, manages to delay the wedding for years. When José Arcadio and Rebeca agree to be married, Pietro begins to woo Amaranta, who is so embittered that she cruelly rejects him. Despondent over the loss of both sisters, he kills himself.
Petra Cotes
Petra is a dark-skinned woman with gold-brown eyes similar to those of a panther. She is Aureliano Segundo's mistress and the love of his life. She arrives in Macondo as a teenager with her first husband. She briefly dates both of them before her husband dies. After José Arcadio decides to leave her, Aureliano Segundo gets her forgiveness and remains by her side. He continues to see her, even after his marriage. He eventually lives with her, which greatly embitters his wife, Fernanda del Carpio. When Aureliano and Petra make love, their animals reproduce at an amazing rate, but their livestock is wiped out during the four years of rain. Petra makes money by keeping the lottery alive and provides food baskets for Fernanda and her family after the death of Aureliano Segundo.
Mr. Herbert and Mr. Brown
Mr. Herbert is a gringo who showed up at the Buendía house for lunch one day. After tasting the local bananas for the first time, he arranges for a banana company to set up a plantation in Macondo. The plantation is run by the dictatorial Mr. Brown. When José Arcadio Segundo helps arrange a workers' strike on the plantation, the company traps the more than three thousand strikers and machine guns them down in the town square. The banana company and the government completely cover up the event. José Arcadio is the only one who remembers the slaughter. The company arranges for the army to kill off any resistance, then leaves Macondo for good. That event is likely based on the Banana massacre, that took place in Santa Marta, Colombia in 1928.
Mauricio Babilonia
Mauricio is a brutally honest, generous and handsome mechanic for the banana company. He is said to be a descendant of the gypsies who visit Macondo in the early days. He has the unusual characteristic of being constantly swarmed by yellow butterflies, which follow even his lover for a time. Mauricio begins a romantic affair with Meme until Fernanda discovers them and tries to end it. When Mauricio continues to sneak into the house to see her, Fernanda has him shot, claiming he is a chicken thief. Paralyzed and bedridden, he spends the rest of his long life in solitude.
Gastón
Gastón is Amaranta Úrsula's wealthy, Belgian husband. She marries him in Europe and returns to Macondo leading him on a silk leash. Gastón is about fifteen years older than his wife. He is an aviator and an adventurer. When he moves with Amaranta Ursula to Macondo he thinks it is only a matter of time before she realizes that her European ways out of place, causing her to want to move back to Europe. However, when he realizes his wife intends to stay in Macondo, he arranges for his airplane to be shipped over so he can start an airmail service. The plane is shipped to Africa by mistake. When he travels there to claim it, Amaranta writes him of her love for Aureliano Babilonia Buendía. Gastón takes the news in stride, only asking that they ship him his velocipede.
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez is only a minor character in the novel but he has the distinction of bearing the same name as the author. He is the great-great-grandson of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. He and Aureliano Babilonia are close friends because they know the history of the town, which no one else believes. He leaves for Paris after winning a contest and decides to stay there, selling old newspapers and empty bottles. He is one of the few who is able to leave Macondo before the town is wiped out entirely.
Major themes
The subjectivity of reality and Magical Realism
Critics often cite certain works by García Márquez, such as A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as exemplary of magical realism, a style of writing in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary. The term was coined by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925.
The novel presents a fictional story in a fictional setting. The extraordinary events and characteres are fabricated. However the message that Marquez intends to deliver explains a true history. Marquez utilizes his fantastic story as an expression of reality. "In One Hundred Years of Solitude myth and history overlap. The myth acts as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. Marquez’s novel can furthermore be referred to as anthropology, where truth is found in language and myth. What is real and what is fiction are indistinguishable. There are three main mythical elements of the novel: classical stories alluding to foundations and origins, characters resembling mythical heroes, and supernatural elements" Magical realism is inherent in the novel-achieved by the constant intertwining of the ordinary with the extraordinary. This magical realism strikes at one's traditional sense of naturalistic fiction. There is something clearly magical about the world of Macondo. It is a state of mind as much as, or more than, a geographical place. For example, one learns very little about its actual physical layout. Furthermore, once in it, the reader must be prepared to meet whatever the imagination of the author presents to him or her.
García Márquez achieves a perfect blend of the real with the magical through the masterful use of tone and narration. By maintaining the same tone throughout the novel, Márquez makes the extraordinary blend with the ordinary. His condensation of and lackadaisical manner in describing events causes the extraordinary to seem less remarkable than it actually is, thereby perfectly blending the real with the magical. Reinforcing this effect is the unastonished tone in which the book is written. This tone restricts the ability of the reader to question the events of the novel, however, it also causes the reader to call into question the limits of reality. Furthermore, maintaining the same narrator throughout the novel familiarizes the reader with his voice and causes he or she to become accustomed to the extraordinary events in the novel .
The fluidity of time
One Hundred Years of Solitude contains several ideas concerning time. Although the story can be read as a linear progression of events, both when considering individual lives and Macondo's history, García Márquez allows room for several other interpretations of time:
* He reiterates the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family. Over six generations, all the José Arcadios possess inquisitive and rational dispositions as well as enormous physical strength. The Aurelianos, meanwhile, lean towards insularity and quietude. This repetition of traits reproduces the history of the individual characters and, ultimately, a history of the town as a succession of the same mistakes ad infinitum due to some endogenous hubris in our nature.
* The novel explores the issue of timelessness or eternity even within the framework of mortal existence. A major trope with which it accomplishes this task is the alchemist's laboratory in the Buendía family home. The laboratory was first designed by Melquíades near the start of the story and remains essentially unchanged throughout its course. It is a place where the male Buendía characters can indulge their will to solitude, whether through attempts to deconstruct the world with reason as in the case of José Arcadio Buendía, or by the endless creation and destruction of golden fish as in the case of his son Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Furthermore, a sense of inevitability prevails throughout the text. This is a feeling that regardless of what way one looks at time, its encompassing nature is the one truthful admission.
* On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that One Hundred Years of Solitude, while basically chronological and "linear" enough in its broad outlines, also shows abundant zigzags in time, both flashbacks of matters past and long leaps towards future events. One example of this is the youthful amour between Meme and Mauricio Babilonia, which is already in full swing before we are informed about the origins of the affair .
Incest
A recurring theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the Buendía family's propensity toward incest. The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendía, is the first of numerous Buendías to intermarry when he marries his first cousin, Úrsula. It is worth noting that this initial, incestuous act can be viewed as an "original sin", however it will not be the last one. Furthermore, the fact that "throughout the novel the family is haunted by the fear of punishment in the form of the birth of a monstrous child with a pig's tail" can be attributed to this initial, and the recurring acts of incest among the Buendías.
Solitude
Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected. Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for him or her self, the Buendías become representative of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel. This egocentricity is embodied, especially, in the characters of Aureliano, who lives in a private world of his own, and Remedios, who destroys the lives of four men enamored by her beauty. Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity.
The selfishness of the Buendía family is eventually broken by the once superficial Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes, who discover a sense of mutual solidarity and the joy of helping others in need during Macondo's economic crisis. This pair even finds love, and their pattern is repeated by Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula. Eventually, Aureliano and Amaranta decide to have a child, and the latter is convinced that it will represent a fresh start for the once-conceited Buendía family. However, the child turns out to be the perpetually-feared monster with the pig's tail.
Nonetheless, the appearance of love represents a shift in Macondo, albeit one that leads to its destruction. "The emergence of love in the novel to displace the traditional egoism of the Buendías reflects the emergence of socialist values as a political force in Latin America, a force that will sweep away the Buendías and the order they represent". A well-known socialist, the ending to One Hundred Years of Solitude could be a wishful prediction by García Márquez regarding the future of Latin America.
Literary significance, reception and recognition
One Hundred Years of Solitude has received universal recognition. The novel has been awarded Italy’s Chianciano Award, France’s Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger, Venezuela’s Romulo Gallegos Prize, and the Books Abroad/ Neustadt International Prize for Literature. García Márquez also received an honorary LL.D. from Columbia University in New York City. These awards set the stage for García Márquez’s 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.
García Márquez is said to have a gift for blending the everyday with the miraculous, the historical with the fabulous, and psychological realism with surreal flights of fancy. It is a revolutionary novel that provides a looking glass into the thoughts and beliefs of its author, who chose to give a literary voice to Latin America: "A Latin America which neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration." Gabriel García Márquez
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Márquez addressed the significance of his writing and proposed its role to be more than just literary expression: "I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude"
* In 1970, reviewing the book in the National Observer, William Kennedy hailed One Hundred Years of Solitude as "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."
* The novel topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last 25 years, according to a survey of international writers commissioned by the global literary journal Wasafiri as a part of its 25th anniversary.
According to Antonio Sacoto, professor at The City College of the City University of New York, One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered as one of the five key novels in Hispanic American literature. (Together with El señor Presidente, Pedro Páramo, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, y La ciudad los perros). These novels, representative of the boom allowed Hispanic American literature to reach the quality of North American and European literature in terms of technical quality, rich themes, and linguistic innovations, among other attributes.
Although we are faced with a very convoluted narrative, Garcia Marquez is able to define clear themes while maintaining individual character identities, and using different narrative techniques such as third person narrators, specific point of view narrators, and streams of consciousness. Cinematographic techniques are also employed in the novel, with the idea of the montage and the close-up, which effectively combine the comic and grotesque with the dramatic and tragic. Furthermore, political and historical realities are combined with the mythical and magical Latin American world. Lastly, through human comedy the problems of a family, a town, and a country are unveiled. This is all presented through Garcia Marquez’s unique form of narration, which causes the novel to never cease being at its most interesting point.
The characters in the novel are never defined; they are not created from a mold. Instead, they are developed and formed throughout the novel. All characters are individualized, with many characteristics that differentiate them from others.. Ultimately, the novel has a rich imagination achieved by its rhythmic tone, narrative technique, and fascinating character creation, making it a thematic quarry, where the trivial and anecdotal and the historic and political are combined. (260)
Criticisms
Style
Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to be considered one of, if not the, most influential Latin American texts of all time, the novel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have both received many critical criticisms and reviews. Harold Bloom says “My primary impression, in the act of rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb . . . There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it.”
Inspirations
Garcia Marquez has been accused of using many texts as his inspirations for One Hundred Years of Solitude. Of these, the most well-known is Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha David T. Haberly alleges that “strong cases have been made for Faulkner, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, and Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and one which has not been mentioned is Chateaubriand’s Atala.” Hopkins backs his statement with evidence that Atala was available for Spanish-speaking audiences before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude and makes comparisons between the plot of the two stories and some of the characters.
Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes
Critics have also speculated the potential of Marquez harboring ideals of marianismo, adhering to sexist stereotypes, and reinforcing these stereotypes and sexist attitudes in Cien Anos de Soledad through his portrayal of female characters as domestic housewives. This potentially sexist view also can be viewed as Marquez’s profound reflection on the social and cultural realities that exist in Latin America in terms of how women were viewed, and in particular, in Colombia. “What sort of values does Ursula symbolize? They are these: middle class stinginess, stupidity, superstition, insanity, reactionary activism, etc.” “There are numerous episodes and statements in the book which reinforce the patriarchical values of the story” . “One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the traditional Latin American role of women as adjuncts to men and implies neither qualitative awareness nor literary criticism of the restrictive political and economic systems and notions (ie marianismo) that perpetuate such notions. As a whole, the women of Macondo are pictured as male-defined, biological reproducers or sexually pleasing objects who are treated thematically as accessories to the men who actually shape and control the world.”
McOndo Movement
The portrayal of Latin American culture and society in One Hundred Years of Solitude has been a point of criticism as well. It has been said that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has created a work in which Western audiences portray popular Latin American culture as a primitive society, lacking in technology, and as a region on the world which has been excluded from the effects of globalization. One group movement that speaks out against this portrayal of Latin America as a primitive society is the McOndo movement. McOndo is a Latin American literary movement that breaks away from the long-dominant magical realist literary tradition by strongly associating itself with mass media culture . McOndo attempts to contextualize being Latin American in a world dominated by American pop culture . The movement challenges the natural or rural, magical world typically depicted by the Magical Realism genre .
The work McOndo, by editors Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez, critiques the re-emphasis of the primitive stereotypes of Latin America in One Hundred Years of Solitude. They say “Nuestro McOndo es tan latinoamericano y magico (exotico) como el Macondo real (que, a todo esto no es real sin virtual). Nuestro pais McOndo es mas grande, sobrepoblado y lleno de contaminacion, con autopistas, metro, TV-cable y barriadas. En McOndo hay McDonald’s, computadores Mac y condominios, amen de hotels cinco estrellas construidos con dinero lavando y malls gigantescos” , roughly translated to say “Our McOndo is just as Latin American as the magic (exotic) as the real Macondo (which isn’t real so much as virtual). Our country McOndo is bigger, densely populated and full on contamination, with highways, public transit, cable TV and neighborhoods. In McOndo there are McDonald’s, Mac computers and condominiums, as well as five-star hotels built with clean money and gigantic malls” . He aims to denounce the primitive nature of Garcia Marquez’s Macondo and contrast it with the new McOndo, the metaphorical Latin America we now know after the effects of globalization and corporatization. “Now, thanks to Fuguet and his peers, there is a new voice south of the Rio Grande. It is savvy, street-smart, sometimes wiseass and un-ashamedly over the top. Fuguet calls this the voice of McOndo--a blend of McDonald's, Macintosh computers and condos. The label is a spoof, of course, not only on Garcia Marquez's fictitious village but also on all the poseurs who have turned these latitudes into a pastel tequila ad. ¡Hola! Fuguet is saying. Latin America is no paradise” .
Internal references
In the novel's final chapter, Márquez references the novel Hopscotch (Spanish: Rayuela) by Julio Cortázar in the following line: "...in the room that smelled of boiled cauliflower where Rocamadour was to die" (p. 412). Rocamadour is a fictional character in Hopscotch who indeed dies in the room described. He also references two other major works by Latin American writers in the novel: The Death of Artemio Cruz (Spanish: La Muerte de Artemio Cruz) by Carlos Fuentes and Explosion in a Cathedral (Spanish: El siglo de las luces) by Alejo Carpentier.
Adaptations
* Shuji Terayama's play One Hundred Years of Solitude (百年の孤独, originally performed by the Tenjo Sajiki theater troupe), as well as his film Farewell to the Ark (さらば箱舟) are loose (and not officially authorized) adaptations of the novel by García Marquez transplanted into the realm of Japanese culture and history.
Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has had such a big impact on the literature world, and although this novel is the author's best selling and most translated around the world, there have been no movies produced about it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has never agreed to sell the rights for producing such film, even though his novel has inspired many to write and has more than enough themes to work on in the film industry.
Chapter 1 Page 1
MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades' magical irons. "Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls." José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth. Melquíades, who was an honest man, warned him: "It won't work for that." But José Arcadio Buendía at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. ?rsula Iguarán, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. "Very soon well have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house," her husband replied. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea. He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades' incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck.
In March the gypsies returned. This time they brought a telescope and a magnifying glass the size of a drum, which they exhibited as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam. They placed a gypsy woman at one end of the village and set up the telescope at the entrance to the tent. For the price of five reales, people could look into the telescope and see the gypsy woman an arm's length away. "Science has eliminated distance," Melquíades proclaimed. "In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house." A burning noonday sun brought out a startling demonstration with the gigantic magnifying glass: they put a pile of dry hay in the middle of the street and set it on fire by concentrating the sun's rays. José Arcadio Buendía, who had still not been consoled for the failure of big magnets, conceived the idea of using that invention as a weapon of war. Again Melquíades tried to dissuade him, but he finally accepted the two magnetized ingots and three colonial coins in exchange for the magnifying glass. ?rsula wept in consternation. That money was from a chest of gold coins that her father had put together ova an entire life of privation and that she had buried underneath her bed in hopes of a proper occasion to make use of it. José Arcadio Buendía made no at. tempt to console her, completely absorbed in his tactical experiments with the abnegation of a scientist and even at the risk of his own life. In an attempt to show the effects of the glass on enemy troops, he exposed himself to the concentration of the sun's rays and suffered burns which turned into sores that took a long time to heal. Over the protests of his wife, who was alarmed at such a dangerous invention, at one point he was ready to set the house on fire. He would spend hours on end in his room, calculating the strategic possibilities of his novel weapon until he succeeded in putting together a manual of startling instructional clarity and an irresistible power of conviction. He sent it to the government, accompanied by numerous descriptions of his experiments and several pages of explanatory sketches; by a messenger who crossed the mountains, got lost in measureless swamps, forded stormy rivers, and was on the point of perishing under the lash of despair, plague, and wild beasts until he found a route that joined the one used by the mules that carried the mail. In spite of the fact that a trip to the capital was little less than impossible at that time, José Arcadio Buendía promised to undertake it as soon as the government ordered him to so that he could put on some practical demonstrations of his invention for the military authorities and could train them himself in the complicated art of solar war. For several years he waited for an answer. Finally, tired of waiting, he bemoaned to Melquíades the failure of his project and the gypsy then gave him a convincing proof of his honesty: he gave him back the doubloons in exchange for the magnifying glass, and he left him in addition some Portuguese maps and several instruments of navigation. In his own handwriting he set down a concise synthesis of the studies by Monk Hermann. which he left José Arcadio so that he would be able to make use of the astrolabe, the compass, and the sextant. José Arcadio Buendía spent the long months of the rainy season shut up in a small room that he had built in the rear of the house so that no one would disturb his experiments. Having completely abandoned his domestic obligations, he spent entire nights in the courtyard watching the course of the stars and he almost contracted sunstroke from trying to establish an exact method to ascertain noon. When he became an expert in the use and manipulation of his instruments, he conceived a notion of space that allowed him to navigate across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study. That was the period in which he acquired the habit of talking to himself, of walking through the house without paying attention to anyone, as ?rsula and the children broke their backs in the garden, growing banana and caladium, cassava and yams, ahuyama roots and eggplants. Suddenly, without warning, his feverish activity was interrupted and was replaced by a kind of fascination. He spent several days as if he were bewitched, softly repeating to himself a string of fearful conjectures without giving credit to his own understanding. Finally, one Tuesday in December, at lunchtime, all at once he released the whole weight of his torment. The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wrath of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them:
"The earth is round, like an orange."
?rsula lost her patience. "If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself!" she shouted. "But don't try to put your gypsy ideas into the heads of the children." José Arcadio Buendía, impassive, did not let himself be frightened by the desperation of his wife, who, in a seizure of rage, mashed the astrolabe against the floor. He built another one, he gathered the men of the village in his little room, and he demonstrated to them, with theories that none of them could understand, the possibility of returning to where one had set out by consistently sailing east. The whole village was convinced that José Arcadio Buendía had lost his reason, when Melquíades returned to set things straight. He gave public praise to the intelligence of a man who from pure astronomical speculation had evolved a theory that had already been proved in practice, although unknown in Macondo until then, and as a proof of his admiration he made him a gift that was to have a profound influence on the future of the village: the laboratory of an alchemist.
By then Melquíades had aged with surprising rapidity. On his first trips he seemed to be the same age as José Arcadio Buendía. But while the latter had preserved his extraordinary strength, which permitted him to pull down a horse by grabbing its ears, the gypsy seemed to have been worn dowse by some tenacious illness. It was, in reality, the result of multiple and rare diseases contracted on his innumerable trips around the world. According to what he himself said as he spoke to José Arcadio Buendía while helping him set up the laboratory, death followed him everywhere, sniffing at the cuffs of his pants, but never deciding to give him the final clutch of its claws. He was a fugitive from all the plagues and catastrophes that had ever lashed mankind. He had survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy in the Malayan archipelago, leprosy in Alexandria, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in Madagascar, an earthquake in Sicily, and a disastrous shipwreck in the Strait of Magellan. That prodigious creature, said to possess the keys of Nostradamus, was a gloomy man, enveloped in a sad aura, with an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things. He wore a large black hat that looked like a raven with widespread wings, and a velvet vest across which the patina of the centuries had skated. But in spite of his immense wisdom and his mysterious breadth, he had a human burden, an earthly condition that kept him involved in the small problems of daily life. He would complain of the ailments of old age, he suffered from the most insignificant economic difficulties, and he had stopped laughing a long time back because scurvy had made his teeth drop out. On that suffocating noontime when the gypsy revealed his secrets, José Arcadio Buendía had the certainty that it was the beginning of a great friendship. The children were startled by his fantastic stories. Aureliano, who could not have been more than five at the time, would remember him for the rest of his life as he saw him that afternoon, sitting against the metallic and quivering light from the window, lighting up with his deep organ voice the darkest reaches of the imagination, while down over his temples there flowed the grease that was being melted by the heat. José Arcadio, his older brother, would pass on that wonderful image as a hereditary memory to all of his descendants. ?rsula on the other hand, held a bad memory of that visit, for she had entered the room just as Melquíades had carelessly broken a flask of bichloride of mercury.
"It's the smell of the devil," she said.
"Not at all," Melquíades corrected her. "It has been proven that the devil has sulphuric properties and this is just a little corrosive sublimate."
Always didactic, he went into a learned exposition of the diabolical properties of cinnabar, but ?rsula paid no attention to him, although she took the children off to pray. That biting odor would stay forever in her mind linked to the memory of Melquíades.
The rudimentary laboratory-in addition to a profusion of pots, funnels, retorts, filters, and sieves-was made up of a primitive water pipe, a glass beaker with a long, thin neck, a reproduction of the philosopher's egg, and a still the gypsies themselves had built in accordance with modern descriptions of the three-armed alembic of Mary the Jew. Along with those items, Melquíades left samples of the seven metals that corresponded to the seven planets, the formulas of Moses and Zosimus for doubling the quantity of gold, and a set of notes and sketches concerning the processes of the Great Teaching that would permit those who could interpret them to undertake the manufacture of the philosopher's stone. Seduced by the simplicity of the formulas to double the quantity of gold, José Arcadio Buendía paid court to ?rsula for several weeks so that she would let him dig up her colonial coins and increase them by as many times as it was possible to subdivide mercury. ?rsula gave in, as always, to her husband's unyielding obstinacy. Then José Arcadio Buendía threw three doubloons into a pan and fused them with copper filings, orpiment, brimstone, and lead. He put it all to boil in a pot of castor oil until he got a thick and pestilential syrup which was more like common caramel than valuable gold. In risky and desperate processes of distillation, melted with the seven planetary metals, mixed with hermetic mercury and vitriol of Cyprus, and put back to cook in hog fat for lack of any radish oil, ?rsula's precious inheritance was reduced to a large piece of burnt hog cracklings that was firmly stuck to the bottom of the pot.
When the gypsies came back, ?rsula had turned the whole population of the village against them. But curiosity was greater than fear, for that time the gypsies went about the town making a deafening noise with all manner of musical instruments while a hawker announced the exhibition of the most fabulous discovery of the Naciancenes. So that everyone went to the tent and by paying one cent they saw a youthful Melquíades, recovered, unwrinkled, with a new and flashing set of teeth. Those who remembered his gums that had been destroyed by scurvy, his flaccid cheeks, and his withered lips trembled with fear at the final proof of the gypsy's supernatural power. The fear turned into panic when Melquíades took out his teeth, intact, encased in their gums, and showed them to the audience for an instant-a fleeting instant in which he went back to being the same decrepit man of years past-and put them back again and smiled once more with the full control of his restored youth. Even José Arcadio Buendía himself considered that Melquíades' knowledge had reached unbearable extremes, but he felt a healthy excitement when the gypsy explained to him atone the workings of his false teeth. It seemed so simple and so prodigious at the same time that overnight he lost all interest in his experiments in alchemy. He underwent a new crisis of bad humor. He did not go back to eating regularly, and he would spend the day walking through the house. "Incredible things are happening in the world," he said to ?rsula. "Right there across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys." Those who had known him since the foundation of Macondo were startled at how much he had changed under Melquíades' influence.
At first José Arcadio Buendía had been a kind of youthful patriarch who would give instructions for planting and advice for the raising of children and animals, and who collaborated with everyone, even in the physical work, for the welfare of the community. Since his house from the very first had been the best in the village, the others had been built in its image and likeness. It had a small, well-lighted living roost, a dining room in the shape of a terrace with gaily colored flowers, two bedrooms, a courtyard with a gigantic chestnut tree, a well kept garden, and a corral where goats, pigs, and hens lived in peaceful communion. The only animals that were prohibited, not just in his house but in the entire settlement, were fighting cocks.
?rsula's capacity for work was the same as that of her husband. Active, small, severe, that woman of unbreakable nerves who at no moment in her life had been heard to sing seemed to be everywhere, from dawn until quite late at night, always pursued by the soft whispering of her stiff, starched petticoats. Thanks to her the floors of tamped earth, the unwhitewashed mud walls, the rustic, wooden furniture they had built themselves were always dean, and the old chests where they kept their clothes exhaled the warm smell of basil.
José Arcadio Buendía, who was the most enterprising man ever to be seen in the village, had set up the placement of the houses in such a way that from all of them one could reach the river and draw water with the same effort, and he had lined up the streets with such good sense that no house got more sun than another during the hot time of day. Within a few years Macondo was a village that was more orderly and hard working than any known until then by its three hundred inhabitants. It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died.
Since the time of its founding, José Arcadio Buendía had built traps and cages. In a short time he filled not only his own house but all of those in the village with troupials, canaries, bee eaters, and redbreasts. The concert of so many different birds became so disturbing that ?rsula would plug her ears with beeswax so as not to lose her sense of reality. The first time that Melquíades' tribe arrived, selling glass balls for headaches, everyone was surprised that they had been able to find that village lost in the drowsiness of the swamp, and the gypsies confessed that they had found their way by the song of the birds.
That spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled away by the fever of the magnets, the astronomical calculations, the dreams of transmutation, and the urge to discover the wonders of the world. From a clean and active man, José Arcadio Buendía changed into a man lazy in appearance, careless in his dress, with a wild beard that ?rsula managed to trim with great effort and a kitchen knife. There were many who considered him the victim of some strange spell. But even those most convinced of his madness left work and family to follow him when he brought out his tools to clear the land and asked the assembled group to open a way that would put Macondo in contact with the great inventions.
José Arcadio Buendía was completely ignorant of the geography of the region. He knew that to the east there lay an impenetrable mountain chain and that on the other side of the mountains there was the ardent city of Riohacha, where in times past-according to what he had been told by the first Aureliano Buendía, his grandfather-Sir Francis Drake had gone crocodile hunting with cannons and that he repaired hem and stuffed them with straw to bring to Queen Elizabeth. In his youth, José Arcadio Buendía and his men, with wives and children, animals and all kinds of domestic implements, had crossed the mountains in search of an outlet to the sea, and after twenty-six months they gave up the expedition and founded Macondo, so they would not have to go back. It was, therefore, a route that did not interest him, for it could lead only to the past. To the south lay the swamps, covered with an eternal vegetable scum and the whole vast universe of the great swamp, which, according to what the gypsies said, had no limits. The great swamp in the west mingled with a boundless extension of water where there were soft-skinned cetaceans that had the head and torso of a woman, causing the ruination of sailors with the charm of their extraordinary breasts. The gypsies sailed along that route for six months before they reached the strip of land over which the mules that carried the mail passed. According to José Arcadio Buendía's calculations, the only possibility of contact with civilization lay along the northern route. So he handed out clearing tools and hunting weapons to the same men who had been with him during the founding of Macondo. He threw his directional instruments and his maps into a knapsack, and he undertook the reckless adventure.
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