Gabriel Garcia Marquez must have gotten quite a few bellylaughs from the dissection of his novels over the years, and God in His mercy may he never see mine.
As the Buendia family is whittled down to the last precious few, I have sought meaning, perhaps even confirmation of my own beliefs in life, death, and the Holy Hereafter from what–a novel? But as readers it is our job.
First, Fernanda, the last "lady of the house":
"So that he (Aureliano) went back to his enclosure, reading and rereading the parchments and listening until very late at night to Fernanda sobbing in her bedroom. One morning he went to light the fire as usual and on the extinguished ashes he found the food that he had left for her the day before. Then he looked into her bedroom and saw her lying on the bed covered with the ermine cape, more beautiful than ever and with her skin turned into an ivory casing. Four months later, when Jose Arcadio arrived, he found her intact." (p. three-ninety two)
So Fernanda, having found life–although still not willing to reach out to the living around her–lies in her solitary coffin of skin and sarcophagus of furs, peacefully released from her duties and free to lie there like the queen she always knew that she was.
Jose Arcadio, who never really did stay in the seminary as he insisted to Fernanda, comes home, kisses her brow, has her buried, and immediately sets out to find the buried gold that Ursula had so carefully hidden for the proper owner to find. He is upset to see that it is not directed in his mother’s will, and they happen upon it quite by accident, though he is clearly unwilling to have anything to do with his nephew, the young Aureliano, bastard son of his sister Meme. He lives out a near-Michael Jackson fantasy with bringing young children into the house, gameplaying and extremely dubious goings-on. The house is nearly destroyed by the revelers and he expels all the children, but one day there is an anxious knock on the door:
"It was a dark old man with large green eyes that gave his face a ghostly phosporescence and with a cross of ashes on his forehead. His clothing in tatters, his shoes cracked, the old knapsack on his shoulder his only baggage, he looked like a beggar, but his bearing had a dignity that was in frank contradiction to his appearance. It was only necessary to look at him once, even in the shadows of the parlor, to realize that the secret strength that allowed him to live was not the instinct of self-preservation but the habit of fear. It was Aureliano Amador, the only survivor of Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s seventeen sons, searching for a respite in his long and hazardous existence as a fugitive." (p. four-ninety two)
And believe me, I still wasn’t ready for this one: Jose Arcadio and Aureliano do not recognize him, do not remember, and throw him back out into the street. Here Marquez toys with us, foregoing the expected, or what we have learned may possibly be expected from Marquez even by going far into the offbeat, to twist us again and make us snort with laughter:
"Then they both saw from the doorway the end of a drama that had begun before Jose Arcadio had reached the age of reason. Two policemen who had been chasing Aureliano Amador for years, who had tracked him like bloodhounds across half the world, came out from among the almond trees on the opposite sidewalk and took two shots with their Mausers which neatly penetrated the cross of ashes."
Ya gotta appreciate this from an author. All loose ends are being tied up. No finger-pointing at the loss of narrative structure. Hah! And you though Marquez would have forgotten he left Aureliano Amador escaping the slaughter and leave us to guess that he’d died of old age in the woods? And the punctuation point of the ashen cross bullseye?
Such finesse, such perfection. Yet I still haven’t figured that one out. The household sanctuary now tainted and lost to all? Certainly a change in the magic of the house, the life left in its sole two inhabitants…oh wait a moment, another one bites the dust:
"One September morning, after having coffee in the kitchen with Aureliano, Jose Arcadio was finishing his daily bath when through the openings in the tiles the four children he had expelled from the house burst in. Without giving him time to defend himself, they jumped into the pool fully clothed, grabbed him by the hair, and held his head under the water until the bubbling of his death throes ceased on the surface and his silent and pale dolphin body slipped down to the bottom of the fragrant water. Then they took out the three sacks of gold from the hiding place which was known only to them and their victim. It was such a rapid, methodical, and brutal action that it was like a military operation." (p. four hundred four)
Ursula’s insistance that the rightful owner only be allowed to claim the gold she’d found in the statues and buried has perhaps overtaken the wrongful use of it by Jose Arcadio.
And this: It was such a rapid, methodical, and brutal action that it was like a military operation." The intense ghost of Colonel Aureliano Buendia perhaps leading the attack? Is there something Marquez is telling us here? Are the dead trying to teach the living things that they only realized shortly before their own deaths? Maybe, because there is this last close to this chapter:
"Aureliano, shut up in his room, was not aware of anything. That afternoon, having missed him in the kitchen, he looked for Jose Arcadio all over the house and found him floating on the perfumed mirror of the pool, enormous and bloated and still thinking about Amaranta. Only then did he understand how much he had begun to love him." (p. four-hundred four)
Here Marquez seems to have doubly reiterated what we have learned from the deaths of Ursula, Fernanda, and many of the others; the importance of love.
One more thought on Marquez and the way he deals death–which naturally, if you’re dealing with the span of one hundred years in the history of a family, you need do–is the reappearance of some of the characters as "ghosts" although they are not called such. The line above regarding the dead Jose Arcadio clearly states, " enormous and bloated and still thinking about Amaranta." This implies that the dead are capable of still thinking. Thus, whether in a religious context of the spirit–although this family does not seem particularly religious, and Marquez, I am guessing, is Christian-raised if not out-and-out Catholic–or in a belief of history itself continuing to be alive, it denotes a sense of the spirual world beyond the trials and tribulations of the present. Is it an afterlife, or merely the past? Does Melquiades gradually and finally fade from the scene because he, as the "Ghost of Christmas Future" has no more to offer to the Buendias, or all of Macondo itself?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology