Summary: Chapter 18
Aureliano (II) remains in Melquíades’s old laboratory,
visited occasionally by the ghost of the gypsy himself, who gives
him clues and eventually helps him decipher the prophecies. Aureliano
learns that the prophecies are written in Sanskrit and that they
will be deciphered when they are one hundred years old. The Buendías
have become poor, but they are supported by food sent to them by
Aureliano Segundo’s old concubine, Petra Cotes. Santa Sofía de la Piedad,
the almost-invisible widow of Arcadio, finally gives up on the family,
and, after a half-century of patiently tending to them, she simply
walks away without any real indication of where she is going. Not
long afterward, Fernanda del Carpio, who now does nothing but bemoan
her fate and write to her children in Europe, dies, overcome with
nostalgia.
A few months after Fernanda’s death, her son José Arcadio
(II) returns to Macondo. He has become a solitary, dissolute man.
It turns out that he has not been studying in a seminary but has,
rather, been counting on inheriting a large fortune. He is trapped
in the old, dilapidated house, left with nothing but his memories
and his delusions of grandeur. When he discovers the gold that Úrsula
Iguarán hid under her bed, he falls into debauchery, sharing with
the adolescent children of the town in long nights of revelry. In
his loneliness, he begins to become friendly with the solitary Aureliano
(II), who is making progress in his pursuit of knowledge. The two
Buendías receive a visit from the last remaining son of Colonel
Aureliano Buendía, who, like his sixteen brothers before him, is
shot down by the police as he stands in front of the Buendía house.
The developing relationship between Aureliano (II) and José Arcadio
(II) is abruptly cut off when four of the children, with whom José
Arcadio (II) once celebrated at a party, kill him in his bath and
steal his gold.
Summary: Chapter 19
Amaranta Úrsula returns to Macondo from Europe, bringing
Gaston, her husband. He has followed her back to Macondo, even though
he realizes that her love for her hometown is a nostalgic dream—energetic
and determined, she wants to revitalize the house and the town,
but Macondo’s decline is irreversible. As Aureliano (II) wanders
the rundown town, he discovers that almost no one remembers the
Buendías, once the most notable family in the village. Following
the family propensity toward incestuous love, Aureliano (II) falls
in love with Amaranta Úrsula. He finds partial solace for his unrequited
love in his newfound friendship with a wise Catalonian bookseller,
and with four young scholars he meets in the bookstore. Together,
the scholars prowl the underbelly of Macondo, visiting whorehouses
and bars. In one brothel, Aureliano (II) is comforted by the ancient
Pilar Ternera, his forgotten great-great-grandmother, who offers
him her reliable wisdom and intuition. He also takes a lover, a
black prostitute named Nigromanta. Gaston, bored in Macondo, becomes
preoccupied with his dream of establishing an airmail service in
Latin America. While Gaston is preoccupied, Aureliano (II) takes
the opportunity to admit his love for Amaranta Úrsula. Eventually
she yields, and they become lovers.
Summary: Chapter 20
[Aureliano] saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly
paced . . . in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Gaston travels to Belgium to follow up on his
business plans, and, when he learns of his wife’s affair, he does
not return. First, the Catalonian and then Aureliano (II)’s four
scholar friends leave Macondo, a town now locked in its quiet death
throes. In the midst of the solitude of Macondo, the love affair
between Aureliano (II) and Amaranta Úrsula continues, fiercely and
happily. The Buendía house falls into total disrepair, destroyed
by the couple’s rampant lovemaking and by the red ants that swarm
everywhere. In fulfillment of the family matriarch Úrsula Iguarán’s
old fears about the dangers of incest, the lovers’ baby, whom they
also name Aureliano (III), is born with the tail of a pig. Amaranta
Úrsula bleeds uncontrollably after giving birth and soon dies. Aureliano
(II) seeks comfort in the arms of Nigromanta and in drink, but he
forgets about the newborn baby. When he finds the corpse, ants are
feeding on it. He realizes that the line of the Buendías has come
to an end. He boards himself up in the house and is finally able
to decipher Melquíades’ ancient prophecies. They are a description
of the entire history of the Buendía family, from the time of the founding
of Macondo. As he reads, he finds that the text is at that very moment
mirroring his own life, describing his act of reading as he reads.
And around him, an apocalyptic wind swirls, ripping the town from
its foundations, erasing it from memory.
[Aureliano] had already understood that
he would never leave . . . races condemned to one hundred years
of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Analysis: Chapters 18–20
Suitably, the Buendía family spirals to its final
demise with an act of incest: Aureliano (II) and Amaranta Úrsula,
aunt and nephew, have a child, whom they predictably name Aureliano.
They are the last two surviving members of the Buendía clan, and,
like typical Buendías, they have clung to each other in solitude,
isolated from the outside world. They are practically the last people
remaining in Macondo, a town whose history has run its course and
one that is destroyed in the final lines of the book by the wind
of the apocalypse. One might get the sense that it is not only Macondo
but the entire world that has been destroyed in that final Apocalyptic
fury, and one would not be entirely wrong. In this novel, Macondo
has become a world closed in upon itself: self-referential and encompassing
the full scope of human emotion and human experience. Time has run
out for the Buendía family, which, in some sense, has come to represent
all of humanity, with the Adam and Eve figures of José Arcadio Buendía
and Ursula Iguarán as its source. The suggestion is that humans,
too, will have time run out on them when their endless cycles of
repeating generations finally draw to a close. “[The] history of
the family,” García Márquez writes, “was a . . . turning wheel that
would have gone on spinning into eternity were it not for the progressive
and irremediable wearing of the axle.”
Just as the incestuous relationship between Amaranta
Úrsula and Aureliano (II) signals the inward collapse of the Buendía
family tree, the reading of the prophecies signals time folding
up on itself. As Aureliano (II) reads, past, present, and future
all happen at once. In a sense, this has been happening throughout
the book: ghosts from the past have appeared and disappeared, Pilar
Ternera could read the future as well as the past, and the simultaneity
through which the Buendías move has made the past, the present,
and the future all identical. Aureliano (II)’s final moments are
like a miniature version of what’s been happening all along. Time,
in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is not a single
linear progression of unique events; instead, it is an infinite
number of progressions happening simultaneously, in which no event
can be considered unique because of its ties to both the past and
the future, occurring at the same time somewhere else.
