Summary: Chapter 10
Colonel Aureliano Buendía has withdrawn even further from
society, spending his days locked in his workshop making tiny golden fishes
and refusing to speak about politics. Meanwhile, in his adolescence,
Aureliano Segundo begins to delve into the esoteric mysteries still
preserved in Melquíades’s laboratory; he is often visited by the
specter of Melquíades himself. José Arcadio Segundo—Aureliano Segundo’s
twin brother—on the other hand, begins to show a religious side.
Soon, however, he becomes a cockfighter and sometimes engages in
sex with donkeys. The two brothers, who share a strong resemblance
until they are fully grown, both start sleeping with the same woman,
Petra Cotes, who does not realize that they are not the same man.
When Jose Arcadio Segundo is scared off by a venereal disease contracted
from Petra Cotes, he ends all contact, while Aureliano Segundo decides
to stay with her. The two have a fierce passion for each other,
and something magical in their union causes their farm animals to
be supernaturally fertile. Soon, Aureliano Segundo becomes fabulously
wealthy by virtue of his livestock’s productivity. He throws huge
parties and engages in colossal displays of wealth. The whole village
seems to share in his prosperity.
Driven, like his great-grandfather José Arcadio Buendía,
by the impulse to explore, José Arcadio Segundo tries to engineer
a navigable river passage to the ocean. He is successful only once
in bringing a boat up the river. In his boat are a group of French
prostitutes who promote a huge carnival in Macondo. Remedios the
Beauty is declared queen of the carnival. She has become the most
beautiful woman anyone has ever seen, but still she remains blissfully
ignorant and totally innocent, like a child. At the carnival, however, disaster
strikes. A rival queen, Fernanda del Carpio, arrives, escorted by
mysterious men who begin a riot and then begin firing rifles into
the crowd, killing many revelers.
Summary: Chapter 11
The chapter begins by providing us with a history of Fernanda
del Carpio. She is raised to believe she is destined for greatness,
but her family’s wealth has been fading, and her aristocratic line
is dying. Upon seeing her at the carnival, Aureliano Segundo becomes obsessed
with her, tracking her down in her gloomy city and carrying her
home to marry him. Their personalities, however, clash: she is religious
and haughty, while he is a devoted hedonist. Scorning his wife’s
rigid moral and social code, Aureliano Segundo continues to sleep
with Petra Cotes, both to ensure the fertility of his animals and because
of his wife’s prudishness in bed. Meanwhile, Fernanda attempts to
transform the once- relaxed Buendía house into a facsimile of her
aristocratic home. She rules with an iron hand, and the house becomes
rigidly formal and unpleasant. Despite their estrangement, Aureliano
Segundo and Fernanda have two children early in their marriage:
Renata Remedios (whom everyone calls Meme), and José Arcadio (II).
Úrsula, the hundred-year-old matriarch of the clan, says that José
Arcadio will become pope.
Soon after the birth of Meme, the anniversary of the
armistice that ended the civil war occurs, and the president of
the Republic tries to honor Colonel Aureliano Buendía with the Order
of Merit, which he declines scornfully. His seventeen illegitimate
sons, each named Aureliano, arrive at Macondo to celebrate the anniversary, and
Aureliano Segundo greets their arrival with revelry, much to Fernanda’s
consternation. When the seventeen Aurelianos receive the cross of
ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday, they do not wash off,
and all seventeen brothers keep the mark until their deaths. One
of the sons, Aureliano Triste, discovers that Rebeca, the widow
of José Arcadio Buendía’s son José Arcadio, is still living as a hermit
in her house. Aureliano Triste and another of the Aurelianos, Aureliano
Centeno, decide to remain in Macondo and build an ice factory there,
in a sense fulfilling José Arcadio Buendía’s early prophecy of a
town made of ice. Finally, funded by Aureliano Segundo, Aureliano
Triste builds a railroad connection, decisively linking Macondo
with the industrial, modern world.
Analysis: Chapters 10–11
Character traits are entirely hereditary in One
Hundred Years of Solitude; characters are defined largely
by how their parents or namesakes behaved. But it appears that the
babies in these chapters have been switched at birth: José Arcadio
Segundo does not have the size and impulsiveness of his namesake,
and Aureliano Segundo is not thin and solitary like the elder man
of the same name, Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Instead, José Arcadio
Segundo is intense and solitary like the old Colonel, and Aureliano
Segundo is given to debauchery and excess, like José Arcadio. With
only the names reversed and with such a strong physical resemblance
that they are often mistaken for each other, the twins combine the
traits of the José Arcadios and the Aurelianos into a single mishmash
of identity.
The family is caught in a series of repetitions, with
names and personality traits passed down from generation to generation.
This pattern, however, is not a cyclical one but, rather, one that
has many different lines of progression occurring simultaneously.
Indeed, the family never returns to the exact same point that it
started from, but instead cycles through moments and situations
that are both similar and different from what has gone before.
