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 4
32
25
Time mitigated his mad proposal, but it aggravated his feelings of frustration. He took refuge in
work. He resigned himself to being a womanless man for all his life in order to hide the shame of his
uselessness. In the meantime, Melquiades had printed on his plates everything that was printable in
Macondo, and he left the daguerreotype laboratory to the fantasies of Jose Arcadio Buendia who
had resolved to use it to obtain scientific proof of the existence of God. Through a complicated
process of superimposed exposures taken in different parts of the house, he was sure that sooner or
later he would get a daguerreotype of God, if He existed, or put an end once and for all to the
supposition of His existence. Melquiades got deeper into his interpretations of Nostradamus. He
would stay up until very late, suffocating in his faded velvet vest, scribbling with his tiny sparrow
hands, whose rings had lost the glow of former times. One night he thought he had found a
prediction of the future of Macondo. It was to be a luminous city with great glass houses where
there was no trace remaining of the race of the Buendia. “It’s a mistake,” Jose Arcadio Buendia
thundered. “They won’t be houses of glass but of ice, as I dreamed, and there will always be a
Buendia, per omnia secula seculorumP Ursula fought to preserve common sense in that extravagant
house, having broadened her business of little candy animals with an oven that went all night turning
out baskets and more baskets of bread and a prodigious variety of puddings, meringues, and cookies,
which disappeared in a few hours on the roads winding through the swamp. She had reached an age
where she had a right to rest, but she was nonetheless more and more active. So busy was she in her
prosperous enterprises that one afternoon she looked distractedly toward the courtyard while the
Indian woman helped her sweeten the dough and she saw two unknown and beautiful adolescent
girls doing frame embroidery in the light of the sunset. They were Rebeca and Amaranta. As soon as
they had taken off the mourning clothes for their grandmother, which they wore with inflexible
rigor for three years, their bright clothes seemed to have given them a new place in the world.
Rebeca, contrary to what might have been expected, was the more beautiful. She had a light
complexion, large and peaceful eyes, and magical hands that seemed to work out the design of the
embroidery with invisible threads. Amaranta, the younger, was somewhat graceless, but she had the
natural distinction, the inner tightness of her dead grandmother. Next to them, although he was
already revealing the physical drive of his father, Arcadio looked like a child. He set about learning
the art of silverwork with Aureliano, who had also taught him how to read and write. Ursula
suddenly realized that the house had become full of people, that her children were on the point of
marrying and having children, and that they would be obliged to scatter for lack of space. Then she
took out the money she had accumulated over long years of hard labor, made some arrangements
with her customers, and undertook the enlargement of the house. She had a formal parlor for visits
built, another one that was more comfortable and cool for daily use, a dining room with a table with
twelve places where the family could sit with all of their guests, nine bedrooms with windows on the
courtyard and a long porch protected from the heat of noon by a rose garden with a railing on
which to place pots of ferns and begonias. She had the kitchen enlarged to hold two ovens. The
granary where Pilar Ternera had read Jose Arcadio’s future was tom down and another twice as large
built so that there would never be a lack of food in the house. She had baths built is the courtyard in
the shade of the chestnut tree, one for the women and another for the men, and in the rear a large
stable, a fenced-in chicken yard, a shed for the milk cows, and an aviary open to the four winds so
that wandering birds could roost there at their pleasure. Followed by dozens of masons and
carpenters, as if she had contracted her husband’s hallucinating fever, Ursula fixed the position of
light and heat and distributed space without the least sense of its limitations. The primitive building
of the founders became filled with tools and materials, of workmen exhausted by sweat, who asked
everybody please not to molest them, exasperated by the sack of bones that followed them
everywhere with its dull rattle. In that discomfort, breathing quicklime and tar, no one could see very
well how from the bowels of the earth there was rising not only the largest house is the town, but
the most hospitable and cool house that had ever existed in the region of the swamp. Jose Buendia,
trying to surprise Divine Providence in the midst of the cataclysm, was the one who least
understood it. The new house was almost finished when Ursula drew him out of his chimerical
world in order to inform him that she had an order to paint the front blue and not white as they had
wanted. She showed him the official document. Jose Arcadio Buendia, without understanding what
his wife was talking about, deciphered the signature.
“Who is this fellow?” he asked:
“The magistrate,” Ursula answered disconsolately. They say he’s an authority sent by the
government.”
Don Apolinar Moscote, the magistrate, had arrived in Macondo very quietly. He put up at the
Hotel Jacob—built by one of the first Arabs who came to swap knickknacks for macaws—and on
the following day he rented a small room with a door on the street two blocks away from the
Buendia house. He set up a table and a chair that he had bought from Jacob, nailed up on the wall
the shield of the republic that he had brought with him, and on the door he painted the sign:
Magistrate. His first order was for all the houses to be painted blue in celebration of the anniversary
of national independence. Jose Arcadio Buendia, with the copy of the order in his hand, found him
taking his nap in a hammock he had set up in the narrow office. “Did you write this paper?” he
asked him. Don Apolinar Moscote, a mature man, timid, with a ruddy complexion, said yes. “By
what right?” Jose Arcadio Buendia asked again. Don Apolinar Moscote picked up a paper from the
drawer of the table and showed it to him. “I have been named magistrate of this town.” Jose
Arcadio Buendia did not even look at the appointment.
“In this town we do not give orders with pieces of paper,” he said without losing his calm. “And
so that you know it once and for all, we don’t need any judge here because there’s nothing that
needs judging.”
Facing Don Apolinar Moscote, still without raising his voice, he gave a detailed account of how
they had founded the village, of how they had distributed the land, opened the roads, and
introduced the improvements that necessity required without having bothered the government and
without anyone having bothered them. “We are so peaceful that none of us has died even of a
natural death,” he said. “You can see that we still don’t have any cemetery.” No once was upset that
the government had not helped them. On the contrary, they were happy that up until then it had let
them grow in peace, and he hoped that it would continue leaving them that way, because they had
not founded a town so that the first upstart who came along would tell them what to do. Don
Apolinar had put on his denim jacket, white like his trousers, without losing at any moment the
elegance of his gestures.