I need more time to come to grips with the powerful ending, fable-like and maybe moralistic, and as a point, must have had those of you who’ve read the book tittering with the "I know something you don’t" smugness at my feeble efforts to assign meanings that were so far off from what Marquez states so clearly in the end.
"…because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." (p. four-forty-eight)
Aureliano Babilonia and his aunt (although they are unaware of this particular connection) Amaranta Ursula are the last of their line, tied together by a lust that becomes a love. She is carrying his child, and when their son is born, he is marked with the "tail of a pig" that Ursula always worried about with the incestuous relationships that were sprinkled throughout the history, as well as the offspring born of whores and lovers. I remember even as a child being warned by nuns about anothing as close or closer than first-cousin matings. There was even one married first-cousin couple within our church who’d suffered the heartbreak of their son confined to a wheelchair and his death before he hit the age of eighteen. And their daughter, who was most likely perfectly normal but suffered whispers of her oddly round large head.
All friends are gone, all Buendias dead, (SPOILER: including Amaranta Ursula in childbirth, and the newborn babe, carried off by ants as Aureliano roars his loss of his beloved Amaranta and forgets the baby back at home) and the parchments of Melquiades, as suspected, are in truth the history, past through future of the Buendias and Macondo. They forecast and are destroyed along with Aureliano just as he finds he can decipher them.
And I see love, the caring and touching of each other and mankind, the key to breaking the solitude they each have self-imposed and constructed carefully around themselves. Aureliano discovers it too late:
"Aureliano did not understand until then how much he loved his friends, how much he missed them, and how much he would have given to be with them at that moment. He put the child in the basket that his mother had prepared for him, covered the face of the corpse (Amaranta) with a blanket, and wandered aimlessly through the town, searching for an entrance that went back to the past." (p. four-forty-three)
With most of the town abandoned, his old haunts and acquaintances gone, he commiserates with a bartender:
"The bartender spoke to him about the misfortune of his arm. Aureliano spoke to him about the misfortune of his heart, withered and somewhat crumpled for having been raised against his sister. They ended up weeping together and Aureliano felt for a moment that the pain was over. But when he was alone again in the last dawn of Macondo, he opened up his arms in the middle of the square, ready to wake up the whole world, and he shouted with all his might:
‘Friends are a bunch of bastards!’ " (p. four-forty-four)
There are reasons that we read and must often go back: Did we catch that "he was alone again in the last dawn of Macondo?" We do find that it is indeed the end, as foretold by Melquides and exactly as Aureliano reads of it.
But why is Aureliano not a saving grace because of his ability to love and understand? I would have expected that, a turn-around of history. This then smacks of destiny, even to the tune of a given amount of time–one hundred years–and while he, the end of his line, must bear the suffering in the knowing and the loving, he is too late, his fate is sealed. And, I realize that while I have integrated the story into my own thoughts of death and any sort of afterlife, Marquez has dashed my hopes of complicity in his final words: "…because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."
Even as Aureliano, free of his solitude of soul remains the solitary Buendia left to understand and read the history of his family–and here, a strange surrealistic note that while it may be linearly written, (i.e., "he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death." ), Marquez also notes that it "was based on the fact that Melquiades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant."
Goodness, a touch of Jorge Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths here.
As the winds threaten, as Aureliano reads, anxious to get to that final part, the end of him, the end comes as foretold. There is a play of time warp that Marquez uses. His great-great grandmothers, Ursula and the mistress Pilar, have reached ages well beyond normal range by nearly double. These two are the threads that weave the men, the children together through the century. Yet even they are alone in their own solitudes, their love still not enough, or of the right kind, to save the generations and their lives.
Nor evidently, their souls except as ghosts allowed to walk the rooms in helplessness to overturn that which was written and would come to be.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology