Very very strange stuff happening. The banana company workers go on strike, led in force by Jose Arcadio Segundo, and the military is called into the town. After several attempts at compromise, a meeting is called for the workers to gather at the train station in the center of town to hear the words of the elected arbiters:
"It had been signed by General Carlos Cortes Vargas and his secretary, Marjor Enrique Garcia Isaza, and in three articles of eighty words he declared the strikers to be a ‘bunch of hoodlums’ and he authorized the army to shoot to kill.
"After the decree was read, in the midst of a deafening hoot of protest, a captain took the place of the lieutenant on the roof of the station and with the horn he signaled that he wanted to speak. The crowd was quiet again.
" ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the captain said in a low voice that was slow and a little tired, ‘you have five minutes to withdraw.’ " (p. 327)
The slaughter begins and ends for Jose Arcadio Segundo in a train packed with bodies of the dead. He is not badly injured and jumps from the train in the night to make his way back home to Macondo. He stops along the way at a home where he is fed and cleaned:
"Jose Arcadio Segundo did not speak until he had finished drinking his coffee.
" ‘There must have been three thousand of them,’ he murmured.
" ‘What?’
" ‘The dead," he clarified. ‘It must have been all of the people who were at the station.’
"The woman measured him with a pitying look. ‘There haven’t been any dead here,’ she said. ‘Since the time of your uncle, the colonel, nothing has happened in Macondo.’ " (p. 331)
And it gets even stranger. Jose Arcadio Segundo makes it safely home and is hidden out in Melquiades’ old room. It rains. He remains in the room, unseen by all but his mother, Sofia. Even when the military, still loose in the town and rounding out rebel workers and taking them away by cover of night, come to the Buendia house.
Another entry on that, and more time to decipher the import of what is happening. Jose Arcadio Segundo’s necessary reclusiveness deepens his solitude of mind. Seals his fate to a degree, as it did that of his great-grandfather, Jose Arcadio Buendia beneath the chestnut tree. Is it an acceptance of fate or a rejection of reality? Odd, that the only one who seems to have seen and acknowledged the reality (in this immediate aftermath) is losing his grasp on it and returns to the strange and unintelligible writings of Melquiades.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology