Summary: Chapter 16
The rain that begins the night of the massacre
does not stop for almost five years. Imprisoned by the rain, Aureliano
Segundo lapses into a restful quiet, abandoning the debauchery of
his earlier years. He begins to care for the children, Amaranta
Úrsula and Aureliano (II), Meme’s illegitimate son, who has finally
escaped from the room where Fernanda del Carpio had been hiding
him. Ursula, bed-ridden, grows more senile and less coherent, becoming
merely a plaything for the children, who learn from her the stories
of their ancestors. The rain eats away at the house and reduces
Aureliano Segundo’s vast fortune to nothing, as all the animals
he bred with Petra Cotes die in the flooding. Fernanda occupies
herself with contacting the telepathic doctors, who are trying to
heal her from a disease of the uterus, and she also occupies herself
by tormenting her husband, Aureliano Segundo, who loses his temper
and breaks every valuable thing in the house. Aureliano Segundo,
in turn, occupies himself with an attempt to find the fortune in
gold coins that Úrsula has hidden somewhere in the backyard of the
house. When the rains finally end, Macondo has suffered a precipitous
decline. The banana plantations have been washed away, and the town
is receding backward into memory.
Summary: Chapter 17
With the end of the rains, Úrsula gets out of
bed and tries to rehabilitate the Buendía house. She discovers José
Arcadio Segundo, who has been sequestered in his room for years,
trying to decipher the ancient prophecies of the gypsy Melquíades.
Returning to the house of his concubine Petra Cotes and finding
all their animals dead, they are forced to struggle as never before
to make ends meet. Their parties are merely humble replicas of their
old festivals of debauchery, but they are as happy as they have
ever been, once again falling madly in love with each other. Aureliano
Segundo finds himself spending less and less time with the children,
who are swiftly aging. Aureliano (II) falls into the pattern of the
family’s tall, thin, solitary Aurelianos. Úrsula continues to regress into
her past, eventually dying at more than 120 years
old. Rebeca, José Arcadio’s widow, also dies during this time.
A hellish heat wave descends on the town, and
the townspeople begin to believe that they are plagued. Birds die
in droves, and a strange, semi-human creature, the Wandering Jew,
is discovered in the streets. The town assumes a broken-down, abandoned
feel, and it fills up with nostalgia of its former prosperity. In
the midst of this poverty, Aureliano Segundo devotes himself to
raising the money to send Amaranta Úrsula to Europe for her education,
but his great strength of former years has left him, and he is dying.
José Arcadio Segundo, too, is living his last days, and he is finally
making progress in deciphering Melquíades’ prophecies and in initiating
Aureliano (II) into both the pursuit of prophetic knowledge and
the history of Macondo. Finally, Aureliano Segundo is able to send
Amaranta Úrsula to Brussels. His task complete, he dies at the same
instant as his twin brother José Arcadio Segundo, whose last words
are a reminder to Aureliano (II) about the almost-forgotten massacre
of the striking workers. In the confusion of the burial, Aureliano
Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo’s coffins are mixed up, and each
is buried in the other’s grave.
Analysis: Chapters 16–17
The nearly five-year flood that deluges Macondo, practically
erasing all trace of the banana company from the land, parallels
the Biblical flood that covered the earth in the time of Noah. Then,
as in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the world
had become full of wicked people, and in the Bible the cleansing
flood obliterates them. And it is possible to read the years of
rain in One Hundred Years of Solitude as ordained
by God, in mourning for the massacred workers, and as a cleansing
agent in Macondo. Another, more insidious possibility presents itself,
however. We have already been told that the banana company has the
capacity to bring rain, supplanting the Divine prowess of God Himself,
and it is certainly implied that the replacement of God by modern
technology is symptomatic of the shattered reality of Macondo. The
novel hints that Mr. Brown of the banana company, the man who has
replaced both God and the angel of death, has brought the rains
in order to wash away all traces of the massacre and to erase memory.
With the death of José Arcadio Segundo at the end of
this section, Aureliano (II) becomes the town’s preserver of memories.
As Aureliano (II) explores the town in the final pages of the book,
he discovers that practically all its history has been forgotten:
“the voracity of oblivion,” García Márquez writes, “was undermining
memories in a pitiless way.” Úrsula Iguarán, who in her senility
and extreme old age has become childlike, serves as a metaphor for
the town. Shrunken in its old age and ignorant of its past, Macondo
has returned almost to its infancy. As in the beginning of the town’s
history, gypsies come to town, and they bring the same technologies—magnets
and magnifying glasses—that Melquíades once brought. “The town [is]
so defeated and its inhabitants so removed from the rest of the
world” that the gypsy gimmicks are once again the source of wonderment
for the few inhabitants left in town. Ursula’s statement that “time
was not passing … it was turning in a circle” is more and more accurate.
Macondo, like the Buendía family, seems to be stuck in a series
of circular repetitions, but it is also true that the town, and
the family, are moving ever closer to their final end.
As Aureliano (II) begins to tell the story of what really
happened to the banana workers, it is clear that his version of
the story is quite different from the established one: “one would
have thought that he was telling a hallucinated version, because
it was radically opposed to the false one that historians had created
and consecrated in their schoolbooks.” Fictional history is seen
as truth, while truth is seen as hallucination. This reversal mirrors
the way in which García Márquez continues to shift the boundaries
between reality and fantasy. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, accepted
truth is sometimes less real than fantasy, and vice versa.
