With Meme’s lover, Mauricio Babilonia, shot in the spine beneath her window, Marquez foreshadows the child that comes of the slippery nights before that tragic evening, and of course, we expect her mother’s aghast reaction to her suspicions. Fernanda bundles up herself and her daughter and takes off back to her own birthplace on a train ride that passes past together with present:
"the train went through a poppy-laden plain where the carbonized skeleton of the Spanish galleon still sat and then came out into the clear air alongside the frothy, dirty sea where almost a century before Jose Arcadio Buendia’s illusions had met defeat." (p. 317)
And (to me) the dying of the hope of freedom from the family script by way of yellow butterflys that had followed Meme and her lover around:
"Much time had passed when she saw the last yellow butterfly destroyed in the blades of the fan and she admitted as an irremediable truth that Mauricio Babilonia had died." (p. 318)
Beyond the gringo housing for the banana plantation’s workers, beyond the bounds and bonds of home and territory, Fernanda brings Meme to her childhood home, dilapitated and given over to the weeds and ghosts:
"Meme knew where they were because in the fright of her insomnia she saw pass by the gentlemen dressed in black whom they delivered to the house inside a lead box on one distant Christmas Eve." (p. 318)
And settles Meme in the one sacred, secret spot I’ve always feared:
"On the following day, after mass, Fernanda took her to a somber building that Meme recognized immediately from her mother’s stories of the convent where they had raised her to be a queen, and then she understood that they had come to the end of the journey." (p. 318)
Oh yes, this confirms my version of potential unwed Catholic motherhood: "Hie thee to a convent!" It dealt a greater fear (via the nuns, not my mother) than any image of a demanding, squalling infant could bring about. Odd too, that while I’d not thought of this in decades, it should come up twice in one week, the first time in workshopping a ballad-style poem by one of our Narratives members relating the story of a young woman who becomes a nun, and my immediate question as to the possibility of her pregnancy. Or, her unloveliness, as the least likely to be pick of the litter in some Catholic families was often offered up to convent or seminary for both the assured future of the child and the assured extra indulgences and blessings the parents would receive for their sacrificial lamb.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology