Summary: Chapter 14
During the mourning period for Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Fernanda
del Carpio gives birth to her third child with Aureliano Segundo,
Amaranta Úrsula. For years, the elder Amaranta, who is the last
living second-generation Buendía, has been retreating into her memories.
Amaranta lives more in her lonely, regretful past than in the present.
Visited with a premonition of her own death, she begins to sew her
own funeral shroud. When she finishes, she announces to the whole
town that she will die at dusk, and she offers to take with her
letters from the living to the dead. Still a virgin, she dies. After
Amaranta’s death, Úrsula goes to her own bed and will not get up
again for many years. She is often visited by little Amaranta Úrsula,
with whom she develops a loving relationship.
Meme, the first daughter of Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda
del Carpio, grows up as frivolous as her father, only feigning interest
in the clavichord that her mother forces her to study. With her
father, Meme develops a companionship based on shared interests
and mutual distaste for Fernanda. She befriends a few American girls and
starts to socialize with them, even learning a little English. Meme
falls madly in love with Mauricio Babilonia, a mechanic working
for the banana plantation who courts her bluntly and shamelessly
and whose openness and solemnity entrance Meme. He is followed always
by yellow butterflies. Fernanda discovers them kissing in a movie
theater and confines the lovesick Meme to the house. When she deduces
that Mauricio Babilonia sneaks into the house every night to make
love to Meme, she posts a guard in the backyard. When Babilonia
returns once more, the guard shoots him, shattering his spine and
paralyzing him for the rest of his life.
Summary: Chapter 15
The tragic paralysis of Mauricio Babilonia traumatizes
Meme, striking her mute. Scandalized by Meme’s behavior, Fernanda
takes her on the long journey back to the city where Fernanda was
born. Meme is interred in a convent, where she spends the rest of
her life thinking about Mauricio Babilonia. Months after she arrives,
one of the nuns from the convent appears at the Buendía house with Meme’s
illegitimate child, fathered by Mauricio Babilonia, whom Fernanda
keeps hidden in Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s old workshop. Ashamed
of Meme’s actions, she pretends that the child is a foundling. He
bears the name of Aureliano (II).
Meanwhile, José Arcadio Segundo, the silent and solitary brother
of Aureliano Segundo, has been organizing the banana plantation
workers to strike in protest of the inhumane working conditions.
Macondo is placed under martial law, and the workers respond by
sabotaging the plantation. The government reacts by inviting more
than 3,000 of the workers to gather for a
meeting with the leadership of the province and to resolve their
differences. The meeting is a trick, and the army surrounds the
workers with machine guns and methodically kills them all. The corpses
are collected onto a train and dumped into the sea. José Arcadio
Segundo, taken for dead, is thrown onto the train as well, but he
manages to jump off the train and walk back to Macondo. There, he
is horrified to discover that all memory of the massacre has been
wiped out—none of the people of Macondo remember what happened,
and they refuse to believe José Arcadio Segundo when he tells them.
A heavy, unrelenting rain falls on the town and does not stop, destroying
any physical traces of the massacre.
The army and the government continue exterminating any
surviving union leaders and denying all reports of a massacre. Finally, José
Arcadio Segundo is tracked down at the Buendía house, where he is
hiding in Melquíades’ old room. Looking in the room, which seems
to all the Buendías exactly as it was in the days of Melquíades, the
soldiers see only decay, as if the room has aged immeasurably. They
do not notice José Arcadio Segundo. Terrified of the outside world
after the massacre, José Arcadio Segundo takes refuge in the gypsy’s
old room, studying Melquíades’ incomprehensible manuscripts. Slowly,
he becomes dead to the outside world and his obsession leads him
to a loss of sanity. José Arcadio Segundo lives only for the study
of his texts and to preserve the memory of the 3,000 who died
in the massacre.
Analysis: Chapters 14–15
In addition to signaling the Buendía family’s
continuing spiral toward its eventual destruction, the dual tragedies
of Meme’s ruined love affair and the massacre of the striking banana
workers allow the later generations of Buendías to revisit the events
that shaped the lives of their ancestors. After Mauricio Babilonia
is shot on Fernanda del Carpio’s command, Meme is forced to become
a nun in the same gloomy convent, in the same grim city, where her
mother Fernanda lived. It is not difficult to see in Meme’s return
to Fernanda’s birthplace an echo of the beginning, in which the
child fulfils the grim destiny from which her mother was rescued
by Aureliano Segundo’s love. And in José Arcadio Segundo’s allegiance
with the strikers, too, lies a parallel—he has taken the place of
Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who, in an earlier generation, fought
for the rights of the working class. Later, after the massacre,
he also inherits Colonel Aureliano’s disillusionment with war and
solitary nature, locking himself up with Melquíades’s manuscripts,
like the Colonel locked himself up with little fishes. With her
typical wisdom, Úrsula Iguarán notices the generational similarities:
“It’s as if the world were repeating itself,” she remarks.
