one Hundred Years of Solitude … Garcia Marquez
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ was born in Aracataca, Colombia in 1928, but he lived most of his life in Mexico and Europe. He attended the University of Bogota and later worked as staff reporter and film critic for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. In addition to ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, he has also written two collections of short fiction, NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL and LEAF STORM.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
Jort Areadio BoendUi
m. Cnula Iguarln
olonel Aurellano Btiendia-
m. Remcdios Moscote
-Jos6 Areadio
m-Rebeca
Aurcliano Jose
(by Pilar Ternera)
17 Aurelianos
R’emedios the Beauty
Areadio
(by Pilar Ternera)
m. Santa Sofia de la Piedad
Aurellano Segundo
m. Fernanda del Carplo
Amaranta
Jose Areadio Segundo
j_Renata
Remedios (Mane)
Aurellano
(by MauHcioBabfionla)
lose Areadio
-..Amaranta
m. Gasti
ranta Orsula
Gaston
Aurellano
(by Aurellano^
Chapter 3
17
A long time passed before
Rebeca became incorporated into the life of the family. She would sit in her small rocker sucking her
finger in the most remote corner of the house. Nothing attracted her attention except the music of
the clocks, which she would look for every half hour with her frightened eyes as if she hoped to find
it someplace in the air. They could not get her to eat for several days. No one understood why she
had not died of hunger until the Indians, who were aware of everything, for they went ceaselessly
about the house on their stealthy feet, discovered that Rebeca only liked to eat the damp earth of the
courtyard and the cake of whitewash that she picked of the walls with her nails. It was obvious that
her parents, or whoever had raised her, had scolded her for that habit because she did it secretively
and with a feeling of guilt, trying to put away supplies so that she could eat when no one was
looking. From then on they put her under an implacable watch. They threw cow gall onto the
courtyard and, mbbed hot chili on the walls, thinking they could defeat her pernicious vice with
those methods, but she showed such signs of astuteness and ingenuity to find some earth that
Ursula found herself forced to use more drastic methods. She put some orange juice and rhubarb
into a pan that she left in the dew all night and she gave her the dose the following day on an empty
stomach. Although no one had told her that it was the specific remedy for the vice of eating earth,
she thought that any bitter substance in an empty stomach would have to make the liver react.
Rebeca was so rebellious and strong in spite of her frailness that they had to tie her up like a calf to
make her swallow the medicine, and they could barely keep back her kicks or bear up under the
strange hieroglyphics that she alternated with her bites and spitting, and that, according to what the
scandalized Indians said, were the vilest obscenities that one could ever imagine in their language.
When Ursula discovered that, she added whipping to the treatment. It was never established
whether it was the rhubarb or the beatings that had effect, or both of them together, but the truth
was that in a few weeks Rebeca began to show signs of recovery. She took part in the games of
Arcadio and Amaranta, who treated her like an older sister, and she ate heartily, using the utensils
properly. It was soon revealed that she spoke Spanish with as much fluency as the Indian language,
that she had a remarkable ability for manual work, and that she could sing the waltz of the clocks
with some very funny words that she herself had invented. It did not take long for them to consider
her another member of the family. She was more affectionate to Ursula than any of her own
children had been, and she called Arcadio, and Amaranta brother and sister, Aureliano uncle, and
Jose Arcadio Buendia grandpa. So that she finally deserved, as much as the others, the name of
Rebeca Buendia, the only one that she ever had and that she bore with dignity until her death.
One night about the time that Rebeca was cured of the vice of eating earth and was brought to
sleep in the other children’s room, the Indian woman, who slept with them awoke by chance and
heard a strange, intermittent sound in the corner. She got up in alarm, thinking that an animal had
come into the room, and then she saw Rebeca in the rocker, sucking her finger and with her eyes
lighted up in the darkness like those of a cat. Terrified, exhausted by her fate, Visitacion recognized
in those eyes the symptoms of the sickness whose threat had obliged her and her brother to exile
themselves forever from an age-old kingdom where they had been prince and princess. It was the
insomnia plague.
Cataure, the Indian, was gone from the house by morning. His sister stayed because her fatalistic
heart told her that the lethal sickness would follow her, no matter what, to the farthest corner of the
earth. No one understood Visitacion’s alarm. “If we don’t ever sleep again, so much the better,” Jose
Arcadio Buendia said in good humor. “That way we can get more out of life.” But the Indian
woman explained that the most fearsome part of the sickness of insomnia was not the impossibility
of sleeping, for the body did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable evolution toward a more
critical manifestation: a loss of memory. She meant that when the sick person became used to his
state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name
and notion of tilings, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being,
Until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past.