At midnight a man wakes up in a freight car piled high with the corpses of men and women machine-gunned during a labor strike that morning. The train heads toward the ocean where the bodies will be dumped. The man, sole survivor Jose Arcadio Segundo, crawls from under the bodies piled high like bananas and leaps off the train. Lying in the grass he counts two hundred freight cars. The train has no lights.
When he arrives in the city of Macondo where the massacre took place, he tells the citizens about the nightmare train filled with the bodies of their kin and neighbors. He is told it is not true. He must be making a mistake. All the workers left the station that morning satisfied that their demands had been met by the banana company. In fact, according to a proclamation issued to the nation by the government, the workers agreed to reduce their demands to two points: an improvement of medical services and the building of latrines in the living quarters.
Jose Arcadio Segundo runs to the house of his friend Colonel Gavilan whose body he saw in the flashes of moonlight which broke through the wooden slats of the freight car. His widow says that the Colonel has returned to his own country. Furthermore, all this talk about a massacre is ridiculous. The president of the banana company is even going to pay for three days of public festivities celebrating the strike’s happy conclusion. Nothing, however, shall be done until it stops raining.
It rains for four years, eleven months, and two days.
We are in the world of Gabriel García Márquez whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles a century in the life of the Buendia family. The novel begins with the founding of Macondo, city of mirrors (or mirage?) by the enterprising Jose Arcadio Buendia, a man haunted by the memory of Prudencio Aguilar, the rival he killed when Aguilar insulted his manhood at a cockfight. In fact, he converses with this dead rival until the day he has become an impenetrably crazy old man tied to a chestnut tree, and Aguilar, old in the decrepitude of death, touches him in a middle room during one of his dreams of an endless journey through identical rooms, and he stays there forever. One hundred years later the novel ends with a cyclone which shall erase Macondo, now a mirrorless modern city, from the memory of man, and with it the last living Buendia, Aureliano Babilonia, great-great-grandson of the madly accursed Jose Arcadio Buendia. Aureliano, who has finally deciphered the Sanskrit parchments written by a gypsy friend of his ancient grandfather, discovers that he is reading a history of his family written one hundred years before it occurred. In this history it is predicted that the deciphering of the parchments will be the final act in the life of the Buendias before the wind, which Aureliano hears raging outside, destroys them forever.
The temptation in any discussion of a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is to understand too quickly the shape of its metaphorical life. After all, our literary intelligence has been trained for hundreds of years to think of metaphor as a kind of lie which writers use. Whether for the purpose of wit or description one usually ends up pointing out what a metaphor can do, and not what it is. We forget, until a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude reminds us, that a metaphor can be a glimpse into the interconnectedness of things, and as such, a large new breath of possibility to our pallid imaginings of self. By allowing science over the past three hundred years to determine how we think about ourselves and our world, we ended up surrendering almost everything except our verifying intelligence — a way of perceiving reality which degrades playfulness, emphasizes facts, goes blank on nuance, and forces unverifiable insights into categories with names like magic, mysticism, and immaturity. But for those heretics in the modern world, children mostly, who grew up believing that science was interesting but hardly passionate enough or resonant enough to answer the problems of existence — or at least had not gotten around to it — the metaphor was a secret pathway into the fields of truth. It was a different sort of truth, surely, but one could play in those fields without being incessantly bored by the need for proofs, or constrained by the shadow which fell across all spontaneity, all intuitiveness. In metaphor, the glorious connection of worlds (father of the poem, of hyperbole, even sometimes of mere excitement!) one found something, which, if it was not the truth, then, as Robinson Jeffers once said, it ran alongside it.
This love and respect for metaphor is at the center of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Pure and simply the world of Márquez is the pre-scientific, pre-psychological world, the place where the poem comes into its own. This is the realm where children play before they become trapped in the labor of sanity, and disdain confusion. Here images cannot go beyond themselves because an image points only to itself, and the cultural agreement among ourselves, our sense of decorum, does not yet exist. Nor has science yet obliterated hallucination, either with pills or language. The burning bush still burns in the wilderness, a privilege to one who has earned the right to see it, while in the air we hear the voices of what the psychologists will call delusions. Magic is not magic but bread and butter and a quarter for the bus; flowers bloom only for themselves, and when transplanted to a garden, they explode; a single note of music on a clear day is a symphony. No one understands anything that matters. The information we receive of this world comes only from children, madmen, witch-doctors, and an occasional poet called a visionary by those who cannot see with his eyes.
This is the world of Macondo before the plague of insomnia robs the citizens of their memory and forces them to write down the names of things. As Kafka says, it is the world before our eyes have looked at it. It is Nietzsche’s Dionysian Dance before the despair which kills our sense of dread, a bird going crazy in the shrinking sky.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ursula, wife of the first Jose Arcadio Buendia, leaves Macondo in search of her son who has eloped with the gypsies. Márquez writes: “She kept getting farther away from the village until she felt so far away that she did not think of returning.” A few pages later Melquiades the gypsy dies. In his lifetime he introduced the wonders of the magnet, the compass, and false teeth to Jose Arcadia Buendia, not only out of respect for the inventions of science, but out of a contempt for flying carpets and multi-colored parrots who can recite Italian arias. Dead, he wishes to return; with his “human burden” he does not like the solitude of death. Rather he will teach Jose Arcadio Buendia the workings of the daguerreotype — another of the wise man’s mistakes because Jose Arcadia Buendia, in part a type for Adam of the garden who falls again and again, will drive himself mad trying to photograph God in every corner in his house. The logic is wonderful and consistent and must be taken for granted. When one has wandered too far away, why return? The thought is child-like (in such a world is one really ever lost?) and yet in this young village of Macondo where singing clocks have not yet replaced singing birds and where the cemetery is still unused, all thinking is still child-like. And why not return from the solitude of death if one can? It is a question which may be asked. One answers, they would if they could, and in Márquez’ world, they can.
No one understands anything that matters. The information we receive of this world comes only from children, madmen, witch-doctors, and an occasional poet called a visionary by those who cannot see with his eyes.
Still the Western imagination, even prepared for this new world, looks for some metaphorical logic in the fact that one afternoon Remedios Buendia, the most beautiful and possibly the most stupid girl in Macondo, ascends into the sky forever along with the sheets which were hanging on the clothesline. Or that her sister-in-law’s father sends to his grandchildren at Christmas a coffin containing his own bubbling corpse. Or that Maurico Babilonia is always preceded by a flock of butterflies wherever he goes, until the night he is mistakenly shot for a chicken thief as he climbs into his lover’s bathroom where she waits for him to make love to her among the scorpions and butterflies. Nor am I saying that an explication cannot be found; it always can. It is just that so much of what is good in Márquez is the texture of a world beyond our daily adult imagining, and it is just this texture which makes One Hundred Years of Solitude a very special book, perhaps like one of those rare dreams in which one floats in a transparent boat through a clear, blue lagoon, and then through a sky which is no longer mysterious, a sky bluer than the sea, and more serene. The texture remains as a remembered charm even after the understanding has offered a motive to replace the dream. A texture: of the loud laughter of a bawdy young woman which frightens away the doves but which one hundred years later sounds like the cooing of the doves themselves, of the hereditary memory passed on from one Buendia to another of an old man with an organ voice wearing a hat which looks like ravens’ wings, of the wounded old hearts which fall in love after the passion which drove the animals to multiply has died away.
Not everybody in the novel lives in the world of the Buendias. Some of the men and women inhabit the world we recognize as our own. Interestingly enough they are either practical or violent, men and women who see what is merely in front of them, that is, what the sad stripping away of their lives has left them to see — like the soldier who searches for Jose Arcadio Segundo after he has escaped from the train of death. He looks into the room where old Melquiades lived during one of his many lives, a room which has remained mysteriously aloof from time for seventy years, dustless, the ink still fresh in the inkwell. Jose Arcadio Segundo sits on the bed but the soldier does not see him. He closes the door. “There must be snakes in there,” he says.
Perhaps one sees what one earns. In this novel it is said that a gypsy tribe disappears because it has passed beyond the limits of knowledge.
No matter though, for beyond the limits of knowledge they will meet solitude. It is the resonant chord of the novel. That emptiness follows the joy of our first expectations, this is certain. Perhaps one will survive like Jose Arcadio Buendia, tied to a chestnut tree, lost for twenty years amidst the impossibilities of a teeming brain, holding conversations with the dead and dreaming the dream of endless identical rooms. Or like his son Colonel Aureliano Buendia who organized thirty-two armed uprisings and lost them all. Discovering that history is a dream between Liberals and Conservatives, he finds the solitude he was hoping to avoid. He watches the street for his own funeral and dies pissing against a tree. In the arrogance of a power he could never legitimize, he quotes the maxim that “the best friend a person has is the one who has just died.” Fascism is the wisdom of loneliness. These men wake to find their hearts gone. They suffer in the solitude of sex, hard ferocious men who run around the world to escape the memory or possibility of love, or who stay at home only to be gunned down by a rival or firing squad, and spinsters who suck their fingers in corners and fly into the burning arms of young boys, surrogates of the dark or light men, the tall or short men, heralded in their afternoon cards. It is the solitude born out of a life which never measures up to its strange possibilities. “How strange men are. They spend their lives fighting against the priests and then give prayerbooks as gifts.” In this world one either remembers in pain or forgets like a stone.
However, before the solitude settles over the lives of these Buendias, it is life which flows through their veins. It is a life willing to re-invigorate the best of the old jokes, like the one of the twins who switch identities in their youth, and, the joke almost complete, are accidentally buried in the right graves. The joke is the mishap, either tragic or burlesque — in the clear sky above the earth all things are equal — which by its very repetition defines the life of the Buendias:
Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera’s bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jose had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.
The joke even begins to constitute a form of the historical imperative: the Buendias shall perish either in the solitude of their passion or in the solitude of their minds. But above all, it is a good joke, Prospero’s joke, as old as the history of man, the same joke about men who push too heavily against the limits of the world, which is to say, men so bemused by what they take to be the infinite possibilities of the world that they never realize that they were not looking at the world, but only at their dream of it.
This article, in slightly different form, originally appeared in The Carolina Quarterly. Our thanks for permission to reprint it.
