Colonel Aureliano Buendia sends his mother Ursula a note: Take good care of Papa because he is going to die. Ursula trusts her son’s prescience and gets help bringing Jose Arcadio Buendia back into the house:
"A smell of tender mushrooms, of wood-flower fungus, of old and concentrated outdoors impregnated the air of the bedroom as it was breathed by the colossal old man weatherbeaten by the sun and the rain. The next morning he was not in his bed. In spite of his undiminished strength, Jose Arcadio Buendia was in no condition to resist. It was all the same to him. If he went back to the chestnut tree it was not because he wanted to but because of a habit of his body. Ursula took care of him, fed him, brought him news of Aureliano. But actually, the only person with whom he was able to have contact for a long time was Prudencio Aguilar. Almost pulverized at the time by the decrepitude of death, Prudencio Aguilar would come twice a day to chat with him. (…) It was Prudencio Aguilar who cleaned him, fed him, and brought him splendid news of an unknown person called Aureliano who was a colonel of the war."
This is a lead in to the loss of a man we have come to know and care about. He has dominated the first 150 pages of this story, and though we have been introduced to the characters of his children, Aureliano, Jose, Amaranta, as well as Rebeca, and the next generation of Arcadio, and young Aureliano, they have not caught my interest in the mystical, magical way of their father.
"When he was alone, Jose Arcadio Buendia consoled himself with the dream of the infinite rooms. He dreamed that he was getting out of bed, opening the door and going into an identical room with the same bed with a wrought-iron head, the same wicker chair, and the same small picture of the Virgin of Help on the back wall. From that room he would go into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another one just the same, and then into another exactly alike, and so on to infinity. He liked to go from room to room, as in a gallery of parallel mirrors, until Prudencio Aguilar would touch him on the shoulder. Then he would go back from room to room, walking in reverse, going back over his trail, and he would find Prudencio Aguilar in the room of reality. But one night, two weeks after they took him to his bed, Prudencio Aguilar touched his shoulder in an intermediate room and he stayed there forever, thinking that it was the real room."
The next morning, Ursula is unable to wake him. Jose Arcadio Buendia is dead.
Jose Buendia has no doubt suffered from dementia for many years (living under a chestnut tree hasn’t helped, I’m sure), and it started from frustration and realization of the hopelessness of his dreams and inventions. But what are the rooms? What is the meaning of the final dream, remaining in the intermediate room, and thinking it is the "real" room? What is the real room–the room of reality? Is it where he is in a current frame of time? Is it life and the others, fantasy? From my own cultivated beliefs, I detect a hint of reincarnated lives within a larger space of time alloted to Jose Arcadio Buendia. I see that he has come halfway perhaps to the eternity we are promised by religion and dedicated to by hope; the infinity of the rooms.
Or is it the past through which Jose has traveled? Are the rooms the stages of his life, and reveal that for all his passionate effort, he has not changed his world? Therefore, would it mean that it is useless to live on, and the mid-point in the train of rooms is where it can end because the future is the same as the past? It could also represent a future, one which he will not live to see, but has provided for through the issue of his children, and which will live beyond him, while he remains behind. Jose is comfortable with the room, consoled by them multiplied many times in exactitude, as if this is his personal space, movable in time as he moves through them. The same but different.
It is always Monday.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology