The rain of four years, eleven months and two days has devastated Macondo. Ursula has survived it, and the sun has revived her–as it does me–as a shot of adrenalin that sends her around the house repairing damage and desolation. But she can only do so much, and sinks back into her age, forgetting who’s who, forgiving the children for using her like a dress-up doll while she was broken in her solitude of decrepitude, and as suspected, she dies. Rebecca, still a recluse in her own home dies.
The second flood wiping out the wicked? A promise unkept by God Himself? A scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds after Ursula dies. A strange half man, half cloven-hoofed creature discovered and hung from a tree. Oddities, symbols, signs.
Able to board the ark to survival, Fernanda, Amaranta Ursula, and the bastard son of Meme, Aureliano as well as Santa Sofia de la Piedad.
Aureliano Segundo has managed to assure Amaranta Ursula’s education in Brussels by raffling off the land in his own burst of energy and renewed interest in family. And soon after,Jose Arcadio Segundo after a brief open-door policy with the household dies within his little solitary room. At the same moment, his twin Aureliano Segundo dies as well.
"The bodies were placed in identical coffins, and then it could be seen that once more in death they had become as identical as they had been until adolescence. aureliano Segundo’s old carousing comrades laid on his casket a wreath that had a purple ribbon with the words: Cease, cows, life is short. Fernando was so indignant with such irreverence that she had the wreath thrown into the trash heap. In the tumult of the last moment, the sad drunkards who carried them out of the house got the coffins mixd up and buried them in the wrong graves." (p. 380)
Strangely sad, that the Segundo twins, possibly switched indenties in youth, switched again at death. Their final small enclosures of solitary confinement not even their own, but maybe in fact, where they rightfully belong.
And so the next generation leaves Macondo in the midst of its reawakening from the rains that held it suspended, as if the showers of the heavens needed to wash and wash and wash away the layers of changes to return it to some former sense of innocence.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology